Piles of Presents Slot Review 2024

Games Global partner Just For The Win is back and just in time for Christmas, with another take on their beloved Plenty of Presents, in Piles of Presents!

As soon as September hits every year, it doesn’t take long for Providers to hop on the festive train and start dishing out their latest Christmas slots ahead of the big day.  Last year we were gifted with all kinds of festive slots and their fancy mechanics, but the one that stood out for us is Plenty of Presents courtesy of Just For The Win.

Although the shelf life of Holiday season slots tend to fizzle out quicker than most, there’s always one or two that will have a permanent place in your favourites all year round. Plenty of Presents stood out to us for many reasons, but the main one was that it was so brutal to trigger the Free Spins round.

Now Just For The Win are back with another take on this ball-busting slot, but will it be just as naughty? or have they had a change of heart and opted for nice this time around? Let’s play on and find out!

Piles of Presents Base Game and Features

Piles of Presents is a 5 reel slot with 20 fixed paylines. Winning combinations are formed when 3 or more of the same symbol types land from left to right, starting from the left-most reel.

The minimum bet available to players is £/€0.20 per spin and the maximum bet available is £/€50 per spin, with plenty of other options in between the two. Piles of Presents has a theoretical RTP of 96.17% and a maximum win capacity of 5,000x.

In terms of symbols, the highest paying regular symbol in Piles of Presents is the Teddy Bear, followed by the Toy Soldier, Train and Drums. Low-paying symbols are standard Ace, King, Queen and Jack. There is also a Wild symbol present which substitutes for all other symbols except Scatters.

Although Plenty of Presents had ‘plenty’ to offer in terms of features, Just For The Win has swapped out the Here Comes Santa Claus feature for a Christmas Wheel feature instead. More on this below!

Christmas Wheel Feature

Sitting idle at the back of the reel set is the Christmas Wheel. In order to access this feature, you will need to collect 1 or more Christmas Tokens across the reels. These Tokens will appear at random and when they do, there is a chance that the Christmas Wheel feature will trigger.

The Christmas Wheel consists of coloured segments and each of the segments is labelled with 1 of 4 Jackpot Prizes. These are as follows.

• Mini – Awards 15x your current bet.
• Minor – Awards 40x your current bet.
• Major – Awards 250x your current bet.
• Mega – Awards 5,000x your current bet.

When the Christmas Wheel stops spinning, the Jackpot it lands on and its respective Prize is awarded.

Piles of Presents: Santa’s Free Spins

Landing 3, 4 or 5 Santa Scatters across the reels triggers the Santa’s Free Spins round, awarding 6 Free Spins.

Before Free Spins can begin, you will be met with a Bonus Pick feature. Depending on how many Scatters you land, 3, 4 and 5 Scatters will award a total of 3, 4 or 5 Bonus Picks respectively.

There are a total of 16 Bonus Features available to choose from, as follows.

• 3, 4, 5, 6 or 9 Extra free spins.
• +1, +2 or +3 Multipliers.
• A random Mid symbol upgrades to a Wild symbol.
• A random Low symbol upgrades to a Mid symbol of the same colour.

Once you have chosen your Picks, the Free Spins round will begin with your new setup in play. During this round, the Win Multiplier will start off at x1 (unless you revealed a Multiplier upgrade during Bonus Picks).

Landing 2, 3, 4 or 5 Santa Scatters during Free Spins, awards an additional +1, +2, +3 and +4 Bonus feature Picks respecitvely. All new Bonus Picks will be automatically applied on the next free spin.

If 2 Santa Scatters happen to land on the last Free Spin, the first Bonus Pick will always reveal additional Free Spins. If all 16 features have been awarded, then only additional Free Spins will be awarded. Please note that the Christmas Wheel will not be able to trigger during this round.

Piles of Presents: Our Verdict

It seems like only yesterday that we were playing Plenty of Presents, and now Santa is back with PILES of presents for the festive season.

Piles of Presents is a very different game to Plenty of Presents with its Christmas Wheel Feature, and the Free Spins round is fairly different too. The older game relied on lots of Wilds, but this time around we’re dealing with multipliers and symbol upgrades.

Retriggers seem fairly important in Piles or Prsents with extra picks awarded for landing at least 2 scatters, and at the upper levels it can really show its stuff.

Is Piles of Presents better than Plenty of Presents? We don’t think so, and the statistics do not bode in favour of Piles of Presents either. The maximum win here is 5,000x in comparison to Plenty of Presents and it’s 25,000x potential.

It might be unfair to compare the two, because they’re different games after all. The share common traits in theme and name but not a lot in the way of gameplay, but regardless, we think Plenty of Presents is still the preferred choice a year down the line.