The Flowers Christmas Edition video pokie brings new meaning to the phrase ‘Hoe, hoe, hoe’ as symbols of garden plants covered in snow and a snowflake in a Santa hat fall across the 5-reels. It’s a sequel to the hugely successful Flowers pokie and moves the action from a sunny garden to the colder conditions of a northern hemisphere winter, which is appropriate because the developer Net Ent are based in Sweden and they can get snow for months at a time.
There’s 10 paylines running from the left side of this casino pokie machine, which will be familiar to anyone who has played the regular version. In fact, with the exception of the wintery theme, it’s identical to the original, having the same double symbols, free spins, multipliers and wild substitutions. But as Flowers was such a quality pokie anyway, there didn’t seem to be any reason to change the gameplay and Net Ent have perhaps made a good decision to leave well alone.
Wins occur when matching symbols land across an active payline running left to right, and although the minimum stake is just 0.01 per spin, there’s free Flowers Christmas Edition video pokies available for players who like to try before they buy. The upper limit is set at 75.00, which could exclude some high rollers, but they would be missing out on a nice game, which has the potential for paying out some great rewards.
The lower value playing card symbols J, Q, K and A have been designed to look like gingerbread biscuits, and even these are topped off with a light dusting of snow, or is it icing sugar? There’s a payout of 5x the line bet when any 3 of a kind stop across the reels, but this rises for longer runs, with the J being worth 100x and the A returns wins of 200x.
Despite it being the depths of winter, the flowers are still in full bloom and these colourful symbols that each have their own cartoon faces and personalities, can either be found in single or double formats. At the lower end, we find dopey-looking bluebells that are worth just 10x when landing in 3 positions, up to 1200x for full lines, but because these are doubles, it’s possible that just reels 1 and 2 will need a bluebell symbol on them to be worth a prize, while the top wins are created by full lines of 10.
Other flowers are pink lilies, a venus flytrap with sharp teeth, laughing sunflowers and the roses that pay from 20 to 2000x when landing across a line. The snowflake Santa is the wild symbol, so it can replace any other, with the exception of the scatter to complete combinations, either by bridging gaps in a line, or extending a run of symbols over more reels. It’s also the highest value symbol, worth a huge 250, 1000, or 5000x when 3, 4 or 5 come to a rest across an active payline.
A smiling cloud acts as the scatter symbol and this cheerful weather feature can also be in single or double styles. At least 4, which can be 2 double symbols, 4 singles or a mix of both, will be needed in any positions to start a free spins game but the number that play out depends on how many clouds triggered them. Either 10, 15, 20, 25 or 30 bonus games begin and during these, any wins are multiplied by 3x over, plus there’s an initial award of between 2x and 10x the total coin stake per spin before the bonus games begin.
A couple of other useful features should ensure that the free spins are a lucrative round for players, as the wild symbol will become stacked throughout them, filling any reel that it lands on, while any time 4 or more scatters float into place, the whole round is retriggered once any left in the current bonus feature have finished.
Flowers seems like a strange choice of pokie to turn into a Christmas edition, as they are not known for blooming in winter, but never mind, it all looks good and the developers have adapted one of their top games, so few players other than the most dedicated gardeners will be complaining.
The Flowers Christmas Edition by Net Ent comes with the same interesting double symbols, high paying wild symbol and richer free spins bonus games as the original, so anyone who likes the basic version and is playing the game in December, or anyone who just really, really likes Christmas, should enjoy this new version just as much.