Winter Champions

Winter Champions: Slot Overview

Are humans more disposed towards warm weather than cold? Only asking after trying to deduce why The Summer Olympic Games are so much more popular than their winter counterparts. Perhaps the reason is partly geographical and where people reside. Perhaps it's because there's more flesh on display at the Summer Olympics than at the Winter Games? Maybe a lot of people simply prefer to stay indoors, keeping toasty warm rather than traipsing across a mountainside. We could ruminate for longer, but instead, how about we glove up, pull on a beany, and do a bit of cold weather adventuring in Relax Gaming's sports slot Winter Champions.

It might be said that generic athletes in sports slots can, sometimes, in some ways come across as a bit cheesy. Winter Champions sidesteps this issue by having animal athletes instead of people. The animal gang has met on the side of a mountain to engage in a selection of winter sports, from ski jumping and curling to ice hockey. The mountain is cloaked in a thick covering of snow, skiers zipping down the slopes, and a sweet villain pad sits atop a rocky crag. Maybe it's a clubhouse, maybe a hotel/restaurant. Feel free to make-believe.

Also coated in snow is Winter Champions' 5-reel, 4-row gaming grid. It utilises 1,024 ways to win, creating winning combinations of 3 to 5 OAK, starting from the leftmost reel. Winter Champions takes wagers of 10 c to $/€150 per spin, and buying entrance to the bonus round from the base game is a possibility. Medium high is the math model volatility rating, and the highest RTP comes in at 96.1%.

Ice block 10-A card ranks are Winter Champions' low-pay symbols. They award 0.3x to 0.4x for a 5 OAK hit. After them are a penguin, a walrus, a polar bear, and a tiger as the higher value picture symbols, awarding 1 to 3 times the bet for a 5-of-a-kind winning combination. A trophy W is the wild symbol, which may be used to replace any regular paying symbol. One wild may land per row.

Winter Champions: Slot Features

Tucked away in its puffy jacket sleeves, Winter Champions is able to reveal such features as Rolling Respins, a Ski Jumping Bonus, an Ice Hockey Bonus, a Curling Bonus, and a bonus buy.

Rolling Respins

When a winning combination lands on the reels, the game moves to Rolling Respins mode. All reels roll down one row, revealing a new row of symbols at the top, potentially triggering more wins. This continues as long as a winning combination is present after a roll.

Bonus Game

The bonus games are triggered by having 3 wild symbols in view on the reels at the same time. Once activated, players can choose Ski Jumping, Ice Hockey, or Curling.

Ski Jumping Bonus

This bonus starts with 6 Rolling Respin chances. When there are no winning combinations, 1 Respin chance is deducted, and the reels continue to roll down by 1 row. Each cascade moves players one step closer to the max prize on a ladder displayed next to the reels. The ladder has 29 steps that start at 0. It has 6 prize thresholds that can be reached - 5x, 10x, 25x, 50x, 100x, and 1,000x. When a wild symbol hits, the prizes on the ladder increase by up to 5 times, up to 25x, 50x, 125x, 250x, 500x, and 5,000x. At the end of the bonus, players win an additional reward, which is the highest threshold prize reached on the ladder. The round ends when there are no more Rolling Respins, the highest threshold is reached, or the win cap is achieved.

Ice Hockey Bonus

This bonus starts with 6 Rolling Respin chances. When there are no winning combinations, 1 Rolling Respin chance is deducted, and the reels continue to roll down by 1 row. Now, coin symbols in the form of pucks may appear stuck to pay symbols with values of 1x to 500x. Moreover, collector goal symbols may also land, showing a multiplier of x2 to x10. A landed collector goal symbol collects all coins in view, awarding their sum multiplied by its multiplier value. After a collector collects, it transforms into a wild. The bonus ends when there are no more Rolling Respins or the win cap is achieved.

Curling Bonus

The Curling Bonus starts with 6 Rolling Respin chances and uses only 2 symbols - coins and blockers. All coins land with a 1x value. The bonus starts with 3 coins and keeps cascading by 1 row. When coins reach the bottom, they begin piling up. If a coin does not land on a respin, 1 Rolling Respin chance is deducted. The bonus ends when there are no more Rolling Respins or the win cap is achieved. At the end of the feature, any column or row that is filled with coins has a corresponding multiplier value multiply the values of all coins on the respective column or row. Each column multiplier is x5, while the row multipliers are x2, x8, x40, and x150, from the bottom row to the top row. After the row and column multiplying is complete, the total coin value is awarded.

Buy Bonus

Paying 50 times the bet gets you entrance to the bonus round phase. From there, players can pick one of the three bonus games.

Winter Champions: Slot Verdict

Winter Champions started on the slow side but managed to heat up as the session wore on. Admittedly, the bulk of the heat came from the 3 bonus rounds, as is usually the case in a slot, but which was more noticeable than normal in Winter Champions. The main game does benefit from the Rolling Respins feature, which is like the PowerNudge effect Pragmatic Play implanted in its futuristic Egyptian slot Rise of Giza PowerNudge. It's quite a neat system. Land a win, then the game rolls the reels down one row, potentially paying again depending on the symbols in view, triggering another roll as long as wins are present. It's a mechanic that emerges in each of the bonus games alongside three different sets of rules.

One of the fun things about reviewing Winter Champions was having a look over each of the three bonus games - which one was most entertaining, which one the least, and which paid out the biggest pile of loot. It was a bit like a test-running Net Gains or Beast Mode and exploring the various pickable free spins modes, though on a lesser powered side of the spectrum. Each of the bonus features in Winter Champions is quite different to each other, providing unique ways to potentially put a smile on a gambler's dial. Winning potential in Winter Champions is capped at 6,000x the bet, which certainly isn't small but is on the relatively lower side for a studio of Relax Gaming's reputation, in some ways. This is a slot that's unlikely to go down in history as a classic release, but Winter Champions is an alright slot to kill some time on, offering a variety of ways for willing participants to test their luck and see what results may or may not end up skating their way.