Chinese New Year Slot Review

Chinese New Year is a video slot from Play’n GO with 5 reels and 15 paylines. Released in time for the Chinese New Year in 2014, the slot can be played at online casinos such as Unibet, Mr Green or Kaboo.

Theme and basic information

As is often the case, the theme of the game is in its title: the Chinese New Year. In fact, the slot could also have been called Chinese Zodiac, because all the animals of the Chinese Zodiac appear on the reels. Adorably drawn portraits of tiger, dragon, monkey, rat, ox, hare, snake, horse, goat, cock, dog and pig can be found on the reels.

The dragon and the monkey are the bonus scatters in the game and the majestic tiger is the wild, who is worth 5,000 coins for 5 on a payline. Among the regular symbols, the rat is the most valuable, paying out 1,000 coins for a 5-of-a-kind win. The ox follows with 750 coins. Snake and hare are worth 500 coins for such a winning combination. The other animals each pay either 100 or 150 coins.

Chinese New Year is easily among the more beautiful slots from Play’n GO, which can have a tendency of looking a little generic at times. That’s not the case here and the reels give you plenty to look at and admire here.

Since you can separately decide the coin value, how many coins you want to play and how many paylines, you can play this game from 0.01 to 18.75, making it a game for the very budget conscious.

A somewhat slow base game

Spinning away on the reels, you’ll usually be waiting to the scatters in the base game. This slot offers medium volatility. Bigger wins are somewhat rare, though regular wins are definitely possible in this game. The high-value symbols already pay out when you get just two of them on the reels, which helps you with your budget. Apart from that, the slot is very budget friendly. That also means, really big wins are unlikely here, but even in the base game it’s possible to stay up on your funds even though there aren’t any special features here.

Two types of scatters for two types of bonus features

The more regular feature you’ll see is probably the Pick-Me feature triggered by getting three dragons on reels 3, 4 and 5. This is the Fireworks Bonus and named thus for good reason: you’ll be looking at five rockets sat atop a rooftop. Picking one will set it off and launch fireworks in the sky beyond.

Unless you get a dud. Then the thing just explodes where it lies, and the bonus round is over. We’ve managed to pick the wrong rocket on our first try. But we also managed to successfully launch the other four rockets first, earning us coin wins before we picked out the dud. This feature offers a maximum of 150x your stake.

The monkey scatter only lands on reels 1, 3 and 5 and will offer up 10 free spins when you manage to trigger the feature. Before those get started, you’ll be looking at a bonus wheel with all the regular animals on it, which is spun by the monkey. The wheel will land on one of the animals, turning it into an additional scatter that will expand and pay out as soon as you get at least two anywhere on the reels. A familiar feature from other Play’n GO slots such as Book of Dead.

Conclusion: A slot that needs a while to get going, but manages to be fun eventually

The theoretical RTP (Return to Player) of Chinese New Year is 96.65%, which is excellent value. But when you first start playing this game, you might not feel so lucky. Sure, the first few wins might leave you thinking that this is how it will continue. But in our experience, the slot tends to be slow going in the beginning. It might take you more than a hundred spins to even trigger the Fireworks Bonus and more than 200 before you first see the Free Spins.

But after we played this slot a while, we managed to get more wins and also triggered the Free Spins more regularly. You won’t always see big wins here, which somewhat depends on whether you get a low-value symbol or a high-value symbol as an added scatter. The low-value symbols show up more frequently, but the high-value ones do bring bigger wins.

All in all, Chinese New Year is quite a beautiful slot that has two decent features. It won’t make you rich, but mostly you’ll be able to keep up on your funds in order to keep playing.