The Stash

The Stash Slot Review

There’s a body sprawled face-down in the rain outside the Black Dog, and nobody in this alley so much as glances at it. That’s The Stash in miniature: a hand-painted noir crime scene wrapped around one of the flatter paytables Blueprint Gaming have shipped, with the real money hidden in symbols the game never fully explains.

The Stash runs a 5×4 grid with 576 ways to win, and its feature set is built around a single named modifier, the Getaway Wild. That places it closer to compact Blueprint outings like Ted and The Goonies than to the studio’s sprawling franchise builds. Whether the style carries the substance is the question this alley is hiding.

Base Game & Features

Wins pay across 576 ways, so matching symbols on adjacent reels from the left land a prize regardless of position on each reel. With a four-row layout across five reels, that’s a comfortable number of routes without the shifting reel counts of a Megaways build.

The paytable splits into character symbols, heist props and royals, and every value below is a multiple of the total bet:

• Glasses man (yellow) – 3 pays 0.25x, 4 pays 0.75x, 5 pays 3.75x
• Hat man (orange) – 3 pays 0.2x, 4 pays 0.6x, 5 pays 3x
• Suit man (blue) – 3 pays 0.2x, 4 pays 0.6x, 5 pays 2.5x
• Woman with cards (purple) – 3 pays 0.2x, 4 pays 0.5x, 5 pays 2x
• Bearded man with gun (teal) – 3 pays 0.15x, 4 pays 0.5x, 5 pays 1.5x
• Briefcase/handcuffs (green) – 3 pays 0.15x, 4 pays 0.5x, 5 pays 1.5x
• Playing cards (pink) – 3 pays 0.1x, 4 pays 0.25x, 5 pays 1x
• Gun (orange) – 3 pays 0.1x, 4 pays 0.25x, 5 pays 1x
• A, K, Q – 3 pays 0.05x, 4 pays 0.2x, 5 pays 0.5x

It’s a flat ladder. Five of the top symbol returns less than four times the stake, and the royals barely register, so the base game’s prizes come from the character end of the table or not at all. Even there, the drop from the yellow glasses man to the orange hat man costs you a quarter of the five-of-a-kind value.

The mid-table tells a similar story. Four of the bearded man with gun pays 0.5x, which is less than three of the glasses man returns at 0.25x short of double. In practice, that means most four-of-a-kind wins across the props and lower characters land between a quarter and half of the stake back, so the ways system’s frequent hits are mostly small returns rather than building blocks.

Beyond the paying symbols sit the Scatter, the Money symbols and the Getaway Wild. The wild’s exclusion list is the clearest hint at where the real money lives, because there’d be no reason to fence off two symbol types unless they carried their own payouts:

• Getaway Wild – lands only on reels 2, 3 and 4
• Scatter – excluded from wild substitution
• Money symbols – excluded from wild substitution
• THE HIT diamond – appears on the reels during play, part of the heist dressing

The Money symbols are the interesting omission. The wild’s rules name them but nothing itemises what they do, which leaves them as the piece of the machine the rest of the game is built around without spelling out the arithmetic.

The Stash Bonus Features

Getaway Wild

The Getaway Wild is a car symbol, labelled GETAWAY WILD X1 where it lands, and it only appears on reels 2, 3 and 4. It substitutes for all symbols except the Scatter and the Money symbols, which makes it the base game’s main engine for completing ways wins across the middle reels.

Because it’s confined to the three central reels, it can’t build a five-of-a-kind on its own. What it can do is bridge the left-side characters into the right-hand reels, which matters more than usual on a paytable this flat. A wild on reel 3 linking characters on reels 1, 2 and 4 is worth more here than it would be on a ladder with a 20x top end.

Its X1 label is worth a glance too. A multiplier tag on a wild usually signals that bigger multipliers exist elsewhere in the same family, which fits a game whose Money symbols carry undocumented weight. As it stands, the X1 tag does the substituting and nothing more.

Scatter and Money Symbols

The Scatter and the Money symbols are both live parts of the game. The wild’s exclusion list is what marks them out: everything else on the grid can be stood in for, and those two can’t. Neither carries a spelled-out rule of its own in the detail the wild gets, so the shape of the bonus economy sits just out of view.

That’s an unusual way to build a slot. Most games front their scatter rules; this one lets the wild’s fine print do the pointing, and the Money symbols carry the implied weight of the whole heist.

The practical effect is that the paytable you can read only accounts for the smaller half of the game’s economy. Every listed value tops out at 3.75x, while the two symbol types the wild won’t touch are the ones a heist slot usually hangs its headline prizes on. The gap between what’s itemised and what’s implied is where this game either pays or doesn’t.

Bonus Buy

A Bonus Buy button sits in the bottom-left of the interface, so the round can be bought outright rather than waited for. No prices are published for it, so there’s nothing to compare against the paytable’s small multiples. The usual arithmetic still applies: a buy is a bet on the undocumented half of the game, the half the wild’s exclusions point to rather than price.

Our Honest Verdict

Overall Rating: 6.1/10

The Stash plays like a quiet night in a beautiful alley. The 576-way grid keeps wins ticking past, most of them small, and the reason anybody picks this one over the louder heist slots is the artwork itself: the painted noir, the deco frame, the dead man on the cobbles nobody’s investigating.

That artwork is the strength, and it’s earned rather than bolted on. The weakness is that everything behind it is thin: one named modifier, a paytable topping out at 3.75x for five of the best symbol, and Money symbols the game points at without ever pricing. The wild’s exclusion list promises a heist the visible paytable can’t deliver on its own.

It’s a good home for players who enjoy a slot as a piece of craft and don’t need a deep feature set or a stated jackpot, and it’ll leave feature-hunters cold. If the alleyway’s look is enough, the Black Dog’s door is open.

The Stash FAQs

• How many paylines does The Stash have?

  The Stash has 576 ways to win, paying for matching symbols on adjacent reels from the left rather than on fixed lines.
• What is the grid size of The Stash?

  The Stash plays on a 5×4 grid, five reels with four rows each.
• Where does the Getaway Wild appear?

  The Getaway Wild only appears on reels 2, 3 and 4. It can’t land on the outer reels, so it works as a bridge across the middle of the grid rather than a full-reel substitute.
• What does the Getaway Wild substitute for?

  The Getaway Wild substitutes for all symbols except the Scatter and the Money symbols, so it completes ways wins for every paying symbol in the game.
• What is the top-paying symbol in The Stash?

  The glasses man in yellow is the top payer, returning 3.75x the total bet for five of a kind. The royals, A K and Q, sit at the bottom at 0.5x for five.
• Can you buy the bonus on The Stash?

  Yes, a Bonus Buy button is part of the interface in the bottom-left of the screen, so the bonus round can be purchased directly rather than triggered through play.
• Who makes The Stash?

  The Stash is made by Blueprint Gaming.
• When is The Stash released?

  The Stash’s release date is 20 April 2023.