Hot Turkey

Hot Turkey: Slot Overview

While it's hard to get definitive numbers, after trawling the Internet, it seems safe to say that millions of turkeys are slaughtered each year for consumption at Christmas dinner tables. Poor birdies. Oh well, there is no industrial slaughtering for food taking place in this here Christmas slot developed by provider Thunderkick, but there are exploding birds, which lead to areas of the grid being marked by multiplier symbols. Christmas slots are often remakes or reskins of other games, and Hot Turkey is no exception, having been built off the back of another Thunderkick cluster paying slot with a food focus, Hot Potato.

Where Hot Potato was set in the impersonal environs of a big city street, Hot Turkey moves the action somewhere much more cosy. And what could be cosier than sitting around a table at Christmas time with family and friends, enjoying a feast? It's hard to think of something on the spot, making Hot Turkey a fine festive slot to fire up if Christmas-themed gambling is what you're after.

Played on a 7x7 gaming area, Hot Turkey is a cluster paying slot, so it does not use ways or paylines. Instead, when 5 or more matching pay symbols are connected horizontally and/or vertically anywhere on the matrix, a win is formed. The winning symbols are removed, triggering an Avalanche that drops symbols down to fill the gaps. Multiple cluster pays may occur simultaneously in the game area, and an Exploding Wild symbol will be placed randomly in one of the cluster pay areas. Avalanching ends only when no new win appears. In a non-festive move, Thunderkick has reduced the maximum RTP down to 94.13%, a solid 2.03% less than Hot Potato, though the volatility stays high. Bet+ and a bonus buy are available, while the stake range is 10 c to $/€100 per spin.

The pay symbols used in Hot Turkey are mistletoe, a candy cane, a wrapped gift, a piece of pie, a frothing mug of beer, and an excited lady. Prizes for hitting 5 OAK clusters are 0.1 to 1 times the bet, while top payout values are 10x to 100x for landing 25+ of a kind. Wild symbols may land to replace any of the regular paying symbols.

Hot Turkey: Slot Features

Hot Turkey keeps things simple yet effective, boosting its Avalanche mechanic with Exploding Wilds, which produce fields of multiplier values. These multiplier values are persistent during the free spins round.

Exploding Wild Symbol & Multiplier Grid

The Exploding Wild symbol may randomly land and explode during a spin or during an Avalanche sequence, or it may be generated and explode in a cluster pay area. The Exploding Wild removes all symbols in a 3x3 Multiplier Grid around and under it. An exploded Exploding Wild triggers an Avalanche.

Each position in the Multiplier Grid gets a multiplier starting at x2. If new Exploding Wilds land and explode on top of an existing Multiplier Grid, the multiplier values double up to a maximum of x128 on the overlapping reel positions. When more than one Multiplier Grid position is included in a win, the values are additive.

Bonus Game

The bonus game triggers when 3 scatter symbols land in the base game to award 10 free spins. Any Multiplier Grids from the base game are reset when free spins start, but Multiplier Grids formed during the bonus round are sticky, so they remain active till the feature ends. Hitting 3 scatters during the round retriggers it.

Feature Buy & Bet+

Buying access to the free spins bonus round in Hot Turkey is possible by paying 100x the bet entrance fee. Alternatively, players may engage the Bet+ ante bets if they so choose. One costs 1.3x the bet to make each spin 2 times more likely to trigger the bonus game. The other costs 2.2x the bet to make each spin 5 times more likely to trigger the bonus.

Hot Turkey: Slot Verdict

Thunderkick, in its wisdom, has not gone totally overboard with the cheap Christmas cliches when it designed Hot Turkey. Oh sure, the festive tunes and the visual cues leave no doubt as to what season this slot would most appropriately be played in, but Hot Turkey is like a tasteful, slightly expensive Christmas card you might send to someone you really like when you want to avoid those 20 for a buck generic bulk packs. Not saying cheap cards don't have their place, by the way, but Hot Turkey has the feel of a slot that the studio spent a bit of time on to come up with a distinctively classy look instead of falling back on a cookie-cutter Santa and Rudolph thing.

Funny then that mechanically, Hot Turkey is basically a reheat of Hot Potato, which probably wouldn't have taken masses of time to bring over. Not a bad set of features to reuse, though, with their nod to Pragmatic Play's hit Sugar Rush due to all the grid position multiplier marking that is possible. The multiplier marking system is different from Prag's, of course, relying on Exploding Wild symbols to get the job done rather than winning symbols. The good news is that Exploding Wild symbols appear often, and they can be fruitful when they start doubling values across the board. Free spins are likely your best bet for this to occur since Multiplier Grids there are sticky, so having access to the two Bet+ options which were not part of Hot Potato might be of benefit.

The ultimate monetary goal of Hot Turkey is combining everything together in order to crack its 10,000x the bet win cap. But, even if that doesn't happen, Hot Turkey serves a hot, steaming dinner plate of cluster pays action, augmented by an exciting rising multiplier mechanic, wrapped in a warm Christmas gown.