Aztec Bonanza

Aztec Bonanza Slot Review

Bonanza is a Spanish word, which is a quiet irony in a game about Aztec gold. Spanish is, after all, what came for the real thing.

Aztec Bonanza stages itself inside a stepped stone temple with the jungle growing over the edges of it, every symbol carved into its own slab and a gilded totem head watching from the right of the reels.

Behind the stonework, the numbers from Pragmatic Play read a 96.53% RTP and medium volatility, across five reels that can each stand up to six symbols tall. That works out at a maximum of 7,776 ways to win.

Tumbling wins are this studio’s furniture, and Sweet Bonanza is where most people meet them. The name itself does plenty of work in the catalogue, Gems Bonanza included.

Ruin-raiding, meanwhile, has a longer-running home in John Hunter and the Tomb of the Scarab Queen. What Aztec Bonanza adds is a grid that starts half buried.

Base Game & Features

The paytable is modest by design. At the stake shown on the rules screen, five of the top symbol, the orange slab with a green gem set into it, returns two and a half times the bet, and five of the weakest card suit about a third of it.

Five reels sit side by side and each one can hold up to six symbols, though rarely all of them at once.

Wins pay left to right on adjacent reels starting from the leftmost, counted as ways rather than lines, and that count climbs as the grid grows.

Every base spin opens with all four corners of the grid covered over in stone, so the first arrangement you see is always played on a reduced board.

Any winning combination is paid and then taken off the grid, the symbols above it drop into the gaps, and new ones fall in from the top. That repeats for as long as each fresh arrangement keeps paying.

Only the highest win counts on any one way, while wins landing across separate ways are added together, so a busy tumble can be paying several at once.

Unlocking the Corners

Two tumbles buys one corner. Each one that comes away adds symbols to the board, widens the number of ways, and brings a modifier of its own with it.

• Top left: Mystery symbols come into play, and at the end of the spin they all turn into the same random paying symbol.
• Top right: Up to three low value symbols are swapped out for up to three high value ones.
• Bottom left: Everything on reels one and two becomes a big 2×2 expanded symbol, for that tumble and every one after it.
• Bottom right: The same treatment for reels four and five.

A sequence that keeps paying is therefore playing on a better board each time round.

There’s no buy button anywhere in the interface either, so the free spins have to be built rather than bought.

Aztec Bonanza Free Spins

The trigger for the free spins in Aztec Bonanza is an unusual one.

Rather than through collecting scatters, free spins arrive when a tumble sequence has knocked all four corners off the grid and then run out of anywhere left to go.

Five free spins are played on the full 5×6 grid with all 7,776 ways live from the first of them.

Special reels come in for the bonus round, and every spin picks one of three modifiers at random.

• Mystery Symbols, which land during the round and then resolve into one random paying symbol
• Symbol Transform
• Giant Symbols

Our Honest Verdict

Overall Rating: 7.2/10

Aztec Bonanza asks an enormous amount of a single spin. The paytable barely pays on its own, the corners only come away two tumbles at a time, and a spin that doesn’t pay at all leaves the board exactly as buried as it found it.

When a sequence does run, the escalation is the best thing here: more symbols and more ways, with a modifier attached to every corner that lifts. Few tumbling games make the third and fourth tumble matter this much more than the first.

What’s waiting at the top is the problem. Clear all four corners and the prize is five spins that can’t be retriggered, the shortest reward in the game for its longest piece of work. It pays steadily rather than dramatically, and with no buy button there’s no shortcut to the interesting part.

So it suits anyone who enjoys a spin that builds, and will frustrate anyone who wants the feature now.

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