Mad Hatters Pokies
Although the famous story of Alice In Wonderland isn’t directly mentioned in the Mad Hatters pokie, it’s clearly the main influence for this game that sees a variety of mad milliners along with the ingredients for a tea party across the 5 reels.
With lots of colour, a range of potential bet sizes and some nice bonus features like expanding wilds, free spins and a pick a prize game, Mad Hatters is insanely good fun and a popular release from the Microgaming developer.
Although the origins of the mad hatter character comes from the unfortunate use of chemicals that they used to make their goods in Victorian times, the Hatters in this game seem cheerful enough, so let’s take a look at how it all works.
Bright pinks and purples welcome players to the game, with symbols all presented in a fairly simple style that’s still quite effective, while there’s not much scope for a background image as the reels take up pretty much the whole screen. The payline indicators show how each of the 30 lines runs across the reels and below is a set of control buttons used to determine how much to wager on a spin.
The value of a coin can be adjusted from 0.01 to 0.10, the number of coins staked per line can be from 1 to 10 and players can choose to activate a single line or any number up to all 30. This gives us a bet range of 0.01 to 30.00 which should suit the majority of players, although it’s a low-ish maximum stake that won’t be enough for everyone.
Wins are created by rows of matching symbols lining up on an active line running from the left, except scatter symbol wins which can be anywhere.
Low value symbols are related to the tea party, with the cupcake being worth 2x the coins staked per line when just 2 of them land on an active line, while moving up the scale there are cups of tea, ice cream sundaes, chocolate cake and a teapot that’s worth 12x for a line of 3, up to 400x for a full row of 5 right across the reels.
The mad hatters, all dressed in suitably colourful clothing and up to strange tricks, make up the higher value wins, with the guy in orange and yellow being worth from 20x to 1000x and the blue and purple fella paying out 50x to 2000x the line bet.
Mad Hatters
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Bonus Features
A red hat is a wild symbol which will act as any others, with the exception of the scatter and bonus icons, if it can complete a winning combination. When the wild lands on the middle reel, it will also expand across it, which improves the odds of completing a line, or maybe even a couple of lines at once.
If the wild makes up a line on its own, without help from anything else, it will reward players with 10x the line bet for just 2 of them, all the way up to the game jackpot of 20,000x when it lands across all reels on an active line.
A crazed-looking bunny peeking out from a top hat is the scatter symbol, triggering a free spins game when he hops into at least 3 positions on the reels. Before the spins start, he pays out 3x, 50x or 300x the total bet amount as a scatter win, depending on whether 3, 4 or 5 have landed, and then 10, 25 or 50 free games will commence, again depending on how many scatters appeared.
During these spins, a mad hatter chosen by the players will act as an extra wild symbol, also expanding over the middle reel when it lands on it.
Landing 3, 4 or 5 cuckoo clock symbols signals the start of a second bonus feature, where players simply get to click on a clock to reveal a prize which can be up to 13,500 coins, but is more likely to be just a few. Still, something’s better than nothing and lucky players could get a decent payout from this game.
Capping it all
Mad Hatters comes with a fairly simple design and somewhat dated drawings, but it’s colourful enough and has a couple of quick animations attached to the wild and bonus symbols. The expanding wilds and free spins games can be pretty rewarding, and the bonus game is a quick and potentially lucrative round that seems to pop up fairly frequently, so this is another welcome addition to the Microgaming range that can be found at the many online casinos which feature software and games from this popular developer.