Texas Tea Pokie Machine
For those who don’t know, Texas Tea refers to the oil that made this state so rich and famous. The pokie from IGT has it splashed all over the reels, in a nice cartoon style that also carries images of other items associated with Texas, such as cactus, armadillos and cattle, in a pokie that’s a little different from others, as it’s simple, but certainly not un-refined.
It’s a 5 reel game, with symbols lined up in 3 rows, and running left to right across the game, we have just 9 paylines. Players can get started with a wager of 0.09 or adjust their bets upwards to a maximum of 90.00 per spin, meaning that most people will be able to line up a few wins and trigger the bonus games along the way.
Talking of bonus games, there’s extra treats like scatter awards and a Big Oil bonus, but despite everything being bigger in Texas, that’s about it for the pokie, as there’s no wild symbol, no free spins and no gamble game. There are however, some Texas-sized jackpot prizes, with up to 10,000x the amount staked per line to win when the right symbols line up in the right places.
Drilling into Texas Tea
Boldly coloured cartoon symbols are flanked by drilling rigs, or derrick’s, which double-up as the holders of payline indicators. A summer sky sits above them, and there’s a few flowers dotted around the base to add to the overall effect. To win a prize in the normal run of play, 3, 4 or 5 matching symbols will need to land across one of the lines on adjacent reels, starting at the left side, with different symbols being worth different amounts when they do so.
Starting at the bottom, the cactus and orange, blue and yellow flowers are each worth 10x the line bet when landing on just 3 reels, while seeing 4 of any type stop on a line will pay 25x and a full line right across the reels will return a win of 100x the line stake.
A Texan in his car will pay 5x the line bet when he parks on reels 1 and 2, but when he also appears on reels 3, 4 and 5, the rewards are 20x, 100x or 250x. The same values are applied to a cow and an airplane painted in a black and white cow pattern. A happy armadillo will return wins of 10x, 25x, 150x and 500x when landing across a line, but the biggest rewards, and the game jackpot, come from the logo symbol. This is worth 2x just for appearing on reel 1, while 10x, 100x, 1000x and 10,000x the line bet comes from more of them across the game.
Texas Tea
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Bonus Features
Although there’s no wild substitutions or a free spins game, this pokie isn’t devoid of extras, with a couple of rewarding rounds, starting with Texas Ted being a scatter symbol who can land in any positions to trigger the Oil Dividend bonus.
Any time this white-bearded, cigar-chomping character lands in 3 spots, players win between 3x and 25x the total stake, while 4 scatters equals a win of between 8x and 50x and if 5 turn up, the prize will be from a minimum of 20x to a maximum of 100x the triggering bet. The payouts are awarded in Texas Teds’ office, where there’s a nice animated sequence that sees his pet armadillo looking on as he writes out a big cheque for the winner.
The other bonus occurs when 3 or more oil well symbols appear on an active line, and this game plays out on a map of the state, with players needing to place drilling rigs across it to collect wins. The amount won depends partly on how many rigs launched the game, and if just 3 triggered it, a prize of between 5x and 100x the bet is paid for each, while 4 rigs will be worth 5x to 200x per derrick and if 5 started the round, the potential awards run from 5x to 495x.
The Verdict
This is an unusual game in a few ways, starting off with the low number of paylines that makes it a little more difficult to line up winning combinations. But with the higher value symbols only needing to be on 2 reels, or even 1 in the case of the game logo, there’s still enough opportunities to keep it interesting.
The bonus rounds are also a little different to what players have come to expect, with wide variations in the potential rewards meaning that they don’t know if triggering a round will mean they strike riches or just strike out.