Deck the Halls Pokie
Deck The Halls is a Christmas-themed online pokie from Microgaming that’s surprisingly popular throughout the year thanks to features like free spins, stacked wilds and multiplier wins, or maybe just because it reminds players of the holiday season and barbies on the beach.
It’s got 5 reels and 30 paylines, all festooned with festivities and richly decorated in the sort of tasteless trinkets that we all seem to believe make our homes look better for a couple of weeks each year. So if it’s late December, or you just want to be reminded of late December, then give Santa a spin on this fun pokie.
No-one’s going to be in much doubt about the theme here, as it screams Christmas at players from the second they open up the game. A background of dark red wrapping paper offset with green garlands encases the reels, while even the payline numbers look like shiny decorations. To top it all off, just in case the point has been missed, the Twelve Days of Christmas plays along in the background and is guaranteed to have players humming the tune all day long.
Deck the Halls
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Nice Baubles
The bet range is something to celebrate as well, with players able to activate just a single line for 0.01, (if they don’t mind 29 out of 30 possible winning combinations passing them by), while coin sizes can be adjusted up to 0.20, and up to 10 coins can be played per line. Add all of this up and we reach a maximum wager of 60.00, which may not break any records, but should be enough for all but the highest-stakes gamblers.
The symbols are all specific to this game, with none of the high playing card icons in sight, and the basic ones consist of various items dangling from a Christmas tree, presents neatly wrapped underneath it, a roast turkey, a roaring fire with stockings hanging from the mantle and then a view of the whole tree itself.
Wins are paid out with identical symbols landing on a payline running from the left side, with 3, 4 or 5 of them equalling higher-value wins. The lowest value pine cone decoration for example pays 5x, 10x or 30x the coins staked per line when 3, 4 or 5 of them land on a line, while the tree pays 50x, 100x and 500x for the same combinations.
Moving on to the special features in this game and we find Santa himself completing the naughty or nice list and paying out 100x, 500x and 1000x the coins per line, but he also appears stacked on the reels to help with the Xmas cheer.
Something else that can be stacked on the reels is the Deck the Halls logo which acts as the wild symbol, and with replace all except the scatter if it will help complete a winning line. Because we have all been good boys and girls, the value of any wins made by wild substitutions is doubled, while the payouts for lines made up exclusively by the wild are the biggest of the game and go up to 4000x for getting them right across the reels.
The Christmas bells decoration are a scatter symbol which doesn’t need to land anywhere in particular to be worth a prize just as long as 3 or more stop on the reels after a spin. As is the case in other pokies, scatter wins are multiples of the total bet per spin, not just the coin values, and in this case we can be celebrating with 2x, 3x, 10x or even 100x the amount when we see 2, 3, 4 or 5 scatters landing at once.
There’s more festive fun when at least 3 scatters appear, as 10 free spins will commence during which all wins are doubled in value. If the wild symbol completes any lines during this round, the value is subsequently quadrupled and this is where the stacked wilds come into effect, so the chances of getting a winning spin with a 4x multiplier are greatly enhanced.
The round can be re-triggered if 3 or more scatters land again, with the new ones added to the end of any still left to play out.
Deck The Halls or Wreck Them?
Anyone looking for a reminder of Christmas cheer should give Deck the Halls a spin, as it’s a colourful game that comes complete with some decent bonus features. Microgaming could have got away with producing a lesser game and still had fans of the season playing it, so it’s nice that they chose to go all-out and release a pokie with treats like multipliers and free spins.