More Chilli Pokie
Australian pokie developer Aristocrat have come up with a spicy game that sees various Mexican treats spinning along 5 reels, over 25 paylines. A fairly plain design shouldn’t put off players looking for a good-value game however, as More Chilli comes with free spins played out on a new set of reels, wild wins and an interesting ‘+5 Extra’ option that boosts the chances of a win and adds extra free spins to the bonus round.
Hola! More Chilli
At first glance this looks like a fairly old-fashioned game, with a simple mountain backdrop and symbols designed in a straightforward way. But digging a little deeper shows that it can be pretty complex, particularly when it comes to setting the stake. Players can wager just 0.01 on a single line if they want to, although this means most winning lines won’t count, or they can have a bet on all lines for as little as 0.25 per spin.
Up to 2.00 can be placed on each, giving a maximum standard bet per spin of 50.00, but whenever all lines are active, there’s an option to add the equivalent of 5 more to the game for an improved win ratio. It’s not free however, taking the top bet to 60.00 and won’t affect the overall payout percentage.
Symbols include the ever-present 9, 10, J, Q, K and A, with images of the Sun, a rooster, chilli cart and chilli bottle being the higher value icons, with the paytable topped off by a blue Chihuahua. Winnings come from landing matching symbols across an active line on sequential reels running from the left, with the 9 being worth 5x, 25x or 50x the stake per line for landing 3, 4 or 5 of them.
The Chihuahua at the other end of the scale is worth 5x just for getting 2 examples, with 50x, 300x or 1500x paid out when 3, 4 or 5 stop across an active line.
More Chilli
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Bonus Bits
The Mexican character is a wild symbol who will substitute for all the main symbols and help to complete winning lines when he does so. He won’t act as the scatter and bonus symbols however. Getting this symbol on its own can lead to some big wins, with just 2 of them equalling a 25x the line bet payout and up to 2000x being paid for landing 5 across the reels.
A bag of cash is a scatter symbol and it will start 12 free spins when at least 3 appear at once. If the ‘+5 Extra’ is in play, then the number is boosted to 15 spins, but however many start, players are taken to 2 sets of reels, with each spinning independently of the other to effectively double the number of potential winning rounds.
During the free games, a Chilli Meter gets filled up every time the chilli symbol appears on either set of reels. If 9 are collected, a third set of reels will appear and all symbols on reel 5, on each set, become wild.
If 14 chillies are added to the meter, a fourth set of reels come into play and reels 4 and 5 become fully wild, with reels 3, 4 and 5 wild should players collect 30 chillies in total. Of course, with more reels in play, the frequency of chillies should improve, making it easier than it appears to collect 14 or 30 of them.
Like many pokies from Aristocrat Gaming, this one features an optional gamble round that players can enter after any winning spin. The triggering bet can be doubled or quadrupled by correctly guessing the colour or suit of a playing card, with the option to repeat the gamble several times over if successful. This can lead to some big rewards, but only if players get it right every time, as a wrong guess along the way loses the initial bet as well as any gamble wins made in the round.
The Verdict
Despite the outwardly simple appearance then, More Chilli is a fairly complex pokie, certainly in the free spins feature anyway. The +5 Extra option is worth taking if players like to see more frequent wins, although overall it won’t put them at any advantage.
The very simple design of the symbols seems at odds with the sophisticated gameplay, but anyone who isn’t worried about such things will find More Chilli to be an interesting game which could bring them some decent rewards.
They just need to be careful in the gamble game and perhaps collect after a single guess, or only risk smaller wins that won’t be missed if the round is unsuccessful.