101 Candies Slot Review
Balloons tied to a striped candy machine, a bowl of lollipops below the reels, cartoon trees framing a shop that promises the best candies in town. Underneath all that sugar, 101 Candies is one of the most patient games NetEnt have built: the multipliers that matter only arrive after the game has been given time to warm up, and the sweetest wins are deliberately withheld from anyone spinning in a hurry.
It’s a 7×7 grid running Cluster Pays, where five or more matching symbols connected horizontally or vertically form a win. The RTP is 96.08%, stakes run from 0.2 to 120 per spin, and the maximum win is 3,580x the bet. If you know Berryburst or Aloha, you’ll know NetEnt’s fondness for this format. 101 Candies pushes it further, with wild multipliers that climb all the way to x101.
Cluster Pays and the Avalanche
There are no paylines. A symbol joins a cluster when it sits directly alongside a matching symbol, horizontally or vertically, and five or more of a kind connected that way pays out. The bigger the cluster grows, the more it’s worth: the top candy symbol awards 30x the total bet for twelve or more.
Every winning cluster disappears, along with any Feature Coin symbols on the grid, and new symbols fall in to replace them. That’s the Avalanche, and it keeps running for as long as new clusters keep forming. One spin can chain several wins together, and each collapse gives the conveyor above the reels a chance to feed a multiplier wild onto the grid. The hit frequency is 25%, so one spin in four starts a cluster.
The paying symbols are the candies and sweets of the title, with gems and lower-value shapes beneath them. Values are multiples of the total bet:
- Pink Swirl Candy: 0.15x for 5, 0.20x for 6, 0.40x for 7, 0.75x for 8, 1.50x for 9, 2.50x for 10, 10x for 11, 30x for 12 or more
- Green Wrapped Candy: 0.75x for 8, 1.50x for 9, 2.50x for 10, 7.50x for 11, 25x for 12 or more
- Blue Candy: 0.30x for 8, 1.50x for 9, 2.50x for 10, 5x for 11, 15x for 12 or more
- Pink/Red Gem and Blue Star: 0.10x for 5, 0.15x for 6, 0.25x for 7, 0.50x for 8, 0.75x for 9, 1.25x for 10, 1.50x for 11-15, 2.50x for 16 or more
- Green Donut and Blue Triangle Candy: 0.05x for 5, 0.10x for 6, 0.15x for 7, 0.25x for 8, 0.50x for 9, 0.75x for 10, 1.25x for 11-15, 2x for 16 or more
Wild symbols appear only via the conveyor, never as reel symbols in their own right. They substitute for the paying symbols and carry their own multipliers, which is what makes them worth so much here.
The Wild Conveyor
Above the reels sits a conveyor loaded with wild symbols, each carrying a multiplier from x2 up to x101 in ascending order. Only five are visible at a time. During each Avalanche, the leftmost wild drops from the conveyor onto the reels, the rest shift left, and new wilds with climbing multipliers fill the gaps behind them.
In the base game the conveyor resets at the start of every spin, so those multipliers only build within a single chain of Avalanches. That’s the tension of the game: a long collapse sequence can drag x50 and x101 wilds into play, but the next spin wipes the slate clean.
Feature Coins
During an Avalanche, a random Feature Coin can land on the reels and trigger one of four effects. Each one works on the conveyor or the grid in its own way:
- Upgrade: increases the multiplier of every wild on the conveyor by 1, capped at x101
- Destroy: removes the five leftmost wilds from the conveyor
- Scramble: shuffles all the wilds on the conveyor
- Transform: picks a random symbol on the reels and turns every instance of it into another symbol; it can’t pick a Scatter or a Wild
Not all four pull in the same direction. Upgrade is the one you want, pushing the whole line of multipliers closer to that x101 ceiling. Transform is the quieter asset, capable of stitching together a large cluster from two halves of the grid.
Destroy does the opposite of what a candy game would have you expect: it clears the five leftmost wilds off the conveyor, which sets the multiplier sequence back and forces the build to start again from lower values. Scramble is more neutral, reshuffling the order of the wilds already there, which can bring a big multiplier forward or bury it. The coin that lands decides whether the chain you’re watching gets stronger or gets reset.
The coins themselves vanish with the winning symbols as part of the same Avalanche, so their effects fire inside the collapse sequence rather than after it. That timing matters: an Upgrade early in a long chain compounds across every remaining collapse.
Free Spins
Landing three to eight Scatters starts a round of 10 to 15 Free Spins, with more Scatters awarding more spins. The scatters themselves don’t pay; they’re pure trigger symbols.
The round runs on one crucial difference. The conveyor resets once, at the start of Free Spins, and then never again. Every wild that lands stays part of a rising sequence across the whole bonus, and Upgrade coins keep stacking multipliers on top. It’s where the x101 wild becomes an achievable target rather than a distant one.
The x101 multiplier sits at the very top of the conveyor display throughout play, a fixed reminder of where the whole game is heading.
Buy Feature
Free Spins can be bought outright for 100x the bet via the Buy Feature button. The buy runs at 96.05% RTP, a hair under the base figure, so there’s no mathematical sweetener either way. For a game whose entire payoff is the non-resetting conveyor, skipping the scatter chase is a defensible shortcut.
Our Honest Verdict
Overall Rating: 7.2/10
This is a game of delayed gratification in a wrapper that promises instant sweets. Most of your time goes to pleasant, unremarkable clusters while the conveyor resets itself spin after spin, and the reason to sit through that is Free Spins, where the resetting stops and the multipliers you’ve been teased with finally stack properly. Watching an x50 wild land on a big cluster makes the whole wait feel earned.
The Free Spins round is the best thing here, because it’s the only place the conveyor’s design is allowed to run to full height. The cost of that is the base game, which spends most spins rehearsing a climb it then cancels, and 3,580x is a modest ceiling for a game built around a x101 multiplier.
It’s for players who enjoy a build that pays off over ten or more spins rather than one. Anyone chasing big single-hit fireworks will find the base game thin. But the patient kind, the sort who let their candy dissolve slowly, get a bonus round that genuinely rewards the wait.
101 Candies FAQs
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What is the RTP of 101 Candies?
The RTP is 96.08%. If you use the Buy Feature, the return is 96.05%, a fraction lower. -
How do wins work on 101 Candies?
It uses Cluster Pays on a 7×7 grid, so there are no paylines. Five or more of the same symbol connected horizontally or vertically awards a win, and the winning symbols then collapse in an Avalanche. -
What does the Wild Conveyor do?
Wilds sit on a conveyor above the reels carrying multipliers from x2 up to x101. During each Avalanche the leftmost wild moves onto the reels and the rest shift left. In the base game it resets every spin; in Free Spins it resets only once, at the start of the round. -
How do you trigger Free Spins on 101 Candies?
Landing three to eight Scatter symbols on the reels starts a round of 10 to 15 Free Spins. -
What do the Feature Coins do?
Four coins can appear during an Avalanche. Upgrade raises every wild’s multiplier by 1 up to x101, Destroy removes the five leftmost wilds, Scramble shuffles the conveyor, and Transform turns all instances of one symbol into another. -
Can you buy the bonus on 101 Candies?
Yes. The Buy Feature activates Free Spins for 100 times your bet. -
What is the maximum win on 101 Candies?
The maximum win is 3,580x the bet. Stakes run from 0.2 to 120 per spin. -
When is 101 Candies released?
101 Candies’ release date is 2 August 2023.
