Joker Troupe Slot – Free Demo

A 2019 machine that never left the lobbies

Joker Troupe was first launched on December 5, 2019. It has never been withdrawn from the market since.

Joker Troupe is a 4-reel, 3-row online slot with 10 win lines paying left to right. Only one win is paid per line, and where more than one is possible the game awards the highest. That means players are restricted to specific pay lines. Wins on separate lines are added together, and the paytable on screen is drawn against whatever bet is currently set. Push Gaming do disclose the RTP in the slot itself: 96.68% in the base game, falling to 96.26-96.34% if you purchase a bonus.

Twenty-three spins between wins

Joker Troupe sets its grid against a circus of coloured jokers with the reels clattering along beneath them. Twenty-two of the spins that did pay me back returned less than the 3.00 I had staked on them. It's also somewhat difficult to track all the joker related slots out there. My longest gap without a win ran 23 spins and ended on spin 319. That theme has been used and abused in absurdum.

The three jokers and the reels that carry them

There are three scatter symbols contained in the game: the Red Joker, the Green Joker and the Blue Joker. Three blue jokers, one apiece on the three reels that can carry them, is what a Blue Joker Feature trigger looks like on this grid. Each of them unlocks a different feature, and all three land on reels 2, 3 and 4 only. Reel 1 never carries one, which leaves three of the four reels doing all the trigger work. That is why three of them at once is a rarer sight than the four-reel grid makes it seem.

Hats that stick and the ladder they open

The Blue Joker Feature is triggered by 3 Blue Joker scatters and grants three spins, and Hats and Red Jokers stick where they land and reset the spins remaining back to three. Those two are the only active symbols for the round, and every position not holding one of them keeps spinning. Every three sticky symbols unlocks a row and advances the Hat multiplier up through x2, x3, x4, x5, x10, x15 and x25. The multiplier applies to Hats that land after a row opens, not to the ones already stuck. At the finish each Hat reveals a stake-based payout. The reveal is random from a fixed feature paytable, with the gold Hats at the top of it and the pale blue ones at the bottom. Three Red Jokers in view then grant the Red Joker Freespins.

One wheel spin that keeps buying itself another

The Green Joker Wheel is triggered when 3 Green Joker scatters land, and when it starts, players receive one wheel spin. Every segment on the face is either one of six normal types or a Booster. Normal segments pay their number times the Wheel Multiplier times the stake, and they award another spin before darkening. A darkened type stays dark for the rest of the feature, so the wheel empties out as the round goes on. Boosters multiply the Wheel Multiplier by 2 and then by 5, up to 100x. The face as pictured carries 1, 2, 5 and 10 segments, the two Boosters and a x100 centre. A third Booster ends the wheel and grants the Red Joker Freespins, while colour segment payouts cap at 1,000 times the stake. That ceiling is per colour segment rather than for the round. The wheel can be purchased for 41.6x, the Blue Joker Feature for 42.5x and a random feature for 66x, if you don't want to wait for it.

A timer instead of a spin count

Triggering the free spins here can be rather a challenge. There are two other ways in: a third Booster on the Green Joker Wheel, and a Blue Joker Feature that finishes with three Red Jokers in view. First, however, you have to land 3 Red Joker scatters. I never got there in 340 spins by any of those routes. These grant 20 seconds of automatic free spins rather than a spin count - or you pay 114x for them.

Every Red Joker that lands speeds the spins up and fills a meter during the free spins, and a filled meter resets the timer to 10 seconds and raises the level. Levels below 4 change nothing about the reels themselves. From level 4 each level adds more "8" symbols, all the way to level 12. Level 12 is where that proportion stops rising. When the timer expires, so does the feature, and that's roughly all there is to the free spins game - simple and straight-forward.

The Minty Take: Three of the four reels can carry a joker, and across 340 spins they handed over one feature: a Blue Joker round on spin 269 worth 7.6 times the stake. That single round accounted for 10% of everything the session won.

What 340 spins produced

It shares a studio with Jammin' Jars and Razor Returns, two of the better-known Push Gaming slots of the last few years. A Blue Joker Feature costs 42.5 times the stake from the buy menu, and what that money guarantees is three spins and whatever sticks to them. With that said, my own 340 spins at a stake of 3.00 credits did nothing to support that reputation: 1,020.00 wagered against 236.40 won, a 23.2% return, only 50 paying spins and a balance that never once rose back above the 1,000.00 it began with. None of that went on a buy - 340 spins at 3.00 accounts for the whole 1,020.00. But the lone Blue Joker Feature I got, on spin 269, paid 22.80 - 7.6 times the stake, and that was the best moment of the session.

I do not question that there will be plenty of players pursuing them jokers.