Big Bass Bonanza

A cheerful man in a bucket hat stands beside five reels, pulling fish out of
the water and turning them into money. That’s it. That’s the game. Big Bass
Bonanza has none of the grid-based cleverness of Pragmatic’s tumbling slots and
it has comfortably outlasted most of the games that did.

Reel Kingdom built it, Pragmatic Play distributes it, and it has since spawned
a franchise large enough that “which Big Bass is this?” has become a reasonable
question at the casino.

The family now runs to Megaways slots, hold-and-spin variants and
seasonal reskins, all built on the same fisherman. Britain’s other great fishing
slot, Fishin’ Frenzy, works on the same instinct and got there first.

Big Bass Bonanza Slot: the Basics

Five reels, three rows, ten fixed paylines. After the pay anywhere grids, it
feels almost quaint. Stakes run from £0.10 to £250 a spin.

The base game is deliberately plain. Fish symbols, tackle, a few card values,
and not a great deal of drama. Everything this slot is famous for happens in the
free spins, and the base game is essentially the waiting room.

The fisherman, and how the money works

The fisherman is the wild, substituting for everything except the scatter.
In the base game that’s ordinary enough. In free spins he becomes the entire
engine.

Each fish symbol carries a cash value. When the fisherman lands during free
spins, he collects every fish on screen and pays out their combined value. So
the round isn’t really about hitting combinations, it’s about how often the
fisherman shows up while the screen is busy.

Free spins and the multiplier ladder

Three, four or five scatters award 10, 15 or 20 free spins respectively.

Inside the round, every four wilds you collect raises a multiplier and
retriggers more spins. Collect twelve wilds and you reach the top of the ladder
at 10x, applied to those fish values. The maximum win of 2,100x your stake sits
at the end of that path, and it requires the ladder maxed and the round
retriggered, which is a long way from a typical bonus.

RTP: check which version you’re on

Big Bass Bonanza ships in at least three RTP configurations. The premium
setting is 96.71%, the standard is 95.67%, and there is a budget version at
94.5%.

That bottom figure is more than two percentage points below the top one, on
the same game, with the same fisherman and the same music. It is the widest
spread we’ve seen on a mainstream slot and it makes checking the information
screen at your casino less of a nicety and more of a basic precaution.

Volatility is rated 4 out of 5 by the developer, which is fair. It is
punishing enough to matter without reaching the flat silence of the Pragmatic
grid games.

Conclusion

Big Bass Bonanza is a simple slot that knows exactly what it is. The base
game is dull on purpose, the bonus is genuinely fun, and the whole thing is held
together by a fisherman who has become more recognisable than most of the
operators that host him.

Just find out which RTP version you’re playing first. On this game more than
most, it’s the difference that actually costs you.

18+. Gambling should be entertainment, not income. Long term the
house wins. Free and confidential help is at BeGambleAware.org.