Rabbit in the Hat Pokie Machine
Rabbit in the Hat is an online pokie themed around a magic show and comes with some interesting bonus rounds that pop up from time to time. Developed by Microgaming, it features nice cartoon style graphics across 5 reels and a fixed number of 9 paylines, while a low to medium bet range makes it suited to all but the more serious gamblers among us.
How to Play
Microgaming have recently started to release pokies with high quality images like the ones found here. It gives Rabbit in the Hat an instant visual appeal, with several of the symbols looking like the sort of computer animated films that come out these days, and when any symbol becomes part of a winning combination, it will dance around a bit to add further movement to proceedings.
It’s all set in a dark theatre, with some stage curtains framing the reels and our friendly magician standing off to one side, waving his hat and wand around as he oversees the action of the show.
Below it all is a simple control panel, with players just needing to decide how much each coin should be worth and how many per line they wish to play with. As all 9 lines are active, the minimum stake is with a single coin valued at 0.01 to give an overall wager of 0.09 per spin, while upping the value of a coin to the maximum of 0.20 and the number of coins per line to the maximum of 10 gives us a top stake of 18.00.
The payout table carries all the information needed for players to see what they stand to win when symbols land in the right places, with the 9, 10, J, Q, K and A playing card symbols, all of which are presented in a suitable cartoon style, being the lower value ones.
Images of objects that any magician would want in his show make up the higher value symbols, including a chained-up cabinet of water, a target with various knives sticking out of it, a treasure chest and the rabbit of the title jumping out from the magicians’ hat.
The most valuable of the base symbols are the beautiful assistant and the magician, but the hat has a couple of jobs, including paying out up to 10,000 coins when 5 land right across a payline. It’s also the wild, so can act as any other base symbol to help complete prize-winning combinations.
Rabbit in the Hat
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Magical Bonuses
Players may have noticed quite a lot of space above the reels, and once the game gets under way they will see just why, as this is where the unique magic hats line up to award the bonus features. During normal play, the magician will add hats to the top of the 5th reel on the right side and they will move along to the left side with each spin.
There are four different types of hat, with each triggering a separate bonus, but the feature will only be triggered if the hat stops on a reel that contains a wild symbol.
One hat will turn the whole reel wild, potentially leading to a number of winning combinations formed when it completes lines. Another hat will award a cash prize, and another will trigger a mystery bonus.
The most rewarding however, is the free spins hat which treats players to a random number of spins, to a maximum of 50. During this round, the assistant takes up position to the left of the reels, counting down the number of spins left to play out, while the magician adds hats to the top of every reel.
They continue to move across the game, with new ones being added until the end of the free spins, although any left over at the end will continue to move down the reels until there are none left.
The Verdict
This is a high-quality offering from a popular and reliable developer. The smart graphics really add an extra dimension to it, and these days, with so many pokies to compete with it’s rare to find a truly different bonus feature but that’s exactly what’s been achieved here.
The hats appear pretty much constantly during the base game, so it’s not as if players are waiting for ages for something to happen, and when the free spins kick in, it can be bonus after bonus.
Pretty much everything about this game is a credit to Microgaming, with only the very minor fact that there’s no option to place just a tiny wager to start with being a potential issue.