Twice The Money Pokie Machine
Set in and around a gold mine, Ainsworths’ Twice The Money pokie has lots of nice images of precious metals and some of the things needed to get the stuff out of the ground.
Despite the name, players can actually get wins of not just twice, but up to 8x the basic value, with sticks of dynamite blowing up the amount won in a free spins game, but even in the normal run of play, this can be quite a rewarding game for anyone digging around for some decent payouts.
On top of the free spins, there’s wild substitutions, scatter wins and a Twice The Money feature game which sees even more free spins added on, but players beware, as there’s a nasty surprise waiting for them in this particular mine.
Playing For Twice The Money
A background picture of the gold mine sits behind the reels, leading players to the potential riches hidden within.
This game is a classic 5 reel, 3 row and 30 paylinepokie where wins come whenever 3, 4 or 5 matching symbols are seen across an active line running left to right. Like most Ainsworth titles, the smaller of these wins will be made by the 9, 10, J, Q, K and A symbols, which are the same ones used across much of their range.
The potential bet sizes that players can spin the reels with, varies from 0.30 to 3000.00, so it’s suitable for just about every budget, and anyone who doesn’t like the prospect of clicking each time they want to spin them can set up an Autoplay function that can run for up to 100 turns.
The 9 and 10 symbols will return wins of 5x, 10x or 50x the value of a coin, and the rest 5x, 20x or 75x, but the pictures of gold and gold mining equipment will bring in the better rewards when they appear.
There’s a miner’s lamp, the mine cart track, a cart full of gold, a signpost and the most valuable standard symbol is a set of scales that pays 25, 100 or 300 coins when landing on 3, 4 or 5 reels across a line.
Twice The Money
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Bonus Features
A bundle of dynamite sticks works as a wild symbol, so anyone landing for example, the lamp on reels 1 and 3 on a line, plus the wild on reel 2, will be paid out as if for 3 lamps. The effect of this is that players will see more frequent winning spins, although the wild only appears on the 3 middle reels and doesn’t have any value on its own.
A big nugget of gold is a scatter symbol, so it won’t need to land across any payline and 3, 4 or 5 of them in any positions will pay 2x, 10x or 100x the total amount of the stake. They will also trigger a free spins game, with an initial 10 spins to get started with.
During the first 4 of these games, any winning lines completed by the dynamite will be multiplied by 2x, while for spins 5 through to 8, any will be quadrupled in value and for the last 2 spins, should the wild be part of a winning combination, the amount won will be multiplied by 8x over.
If 3 or more gold scatter symbols turn up again, players are awarded a further 5 free spins, which play out in Twice The Money mode, which sounds a lot better than it actually is. While the 8x multiplier will be in effect across these 5 spins, the payouts for each symbol are substantially reduced.
It’s common for pokies to have less valuable winning lines during bonus rounds, but the rewards in Twice The Money are less than half, and in the case of the playing card symbols, about one-fifth of what they are worth in the base game.
The Verdict
In normal gameplay, this is a perfectly decent pokie, where nicely designed symbols line up for steady payouts. It may be a classic case of looking a gift horse in the mouth, but there’s no escaping the fact that in the free spins rounds, even with the multipliers in place, unless players get lines made with wild substitutions they are not going to win much at all.
Free games are always welcome, and there’s still some potential to get some big wins in the bonus rounds of Twice The Money, but slashing the value of the standard symbols by up to 80% is taking things a bit far.
However, get over that and we have a pokie that looks good, has mostly reasonable payouts and a big bet range that should make it suitable for just about everyone.