Bugsy’s Bar

Bugsy's Bar: Slot Overview

Step right up and get an eye load of the roaring 20s, 30s, or thereabouts in this crime-ridden online slot from casino game maker Red Tiger called Bugsy's Bar. It's a game full of drinks, daggers, and dastardly do-no-gooders as they seek to make a buck by barely legal means. Hopefully, you like the theme because until free spins trigger, there ain't a whole lot else happening in this bar. Once activated, however, Bugsy goes to work with the pours, serving up a selection of Small-Time Symbol removals, Bonus Spins, Locked Wilds, Super Wilds, and Wins Multipliers.

Bugsy's Bar might glamorise an earlier age of crime, but it also displays some of its less alluring aspects as well. The less savoury parts are the bullet holes and blood spatters all over the jukebox (or whatever it is) housing the game's grid. Scattered around the rest of the screen are classic drinking establishment accoutrements such as liquor bottles, liquor glasses, a smouldering cigar, intimate lampshades, and an equally smouldering gentleman, enigmatically sitting on one side of the room during free spins. Bugsy's Bar caps it all off with a soundtrack that plods through the base game before launching into swing mode when free spins trigger. Fairly dense atmospherically, all things considered, without doing anything exceptional or particularly non-cliched with the theme.

To gain entrance to Bugsy's Bar, players pick a stake of 10 p/c to £/€2 per spin and may use any device to play the game. Once in, users will find a highly volatile math model running the show, firing off solid winning potential and a maximum return to player value of 96%. The action occurs on a game panel of 5 reels and 4 rows of symbols, where 30 paylines cross the grid to land winning combinations on.

Three, four or five-of-a-kind winning lines can land in Bugsy's Bar, made up of J-A Art Deco fonted card royals, then a cash bag, and three nefarious-looking characters as the four high pay symbols. Hitting a five-of-a-kind royal win pays 1 to 2.5 times the stake, increasing to 3 to 10 times the bet for five of the premiums. Lending a helpful hand, wild symbols appear on all reels to substitute any regular pay symbol. Should five wilds land along a payline, they award 10 times the bet for doing so.

Bugsy's Bar: Slot Features

Bugsy's Bar's got nothing in the base game aside from line wins, so it's not until free spins are triggered that the action gets the chance of really hotting up. This occurs when 3 scatter symbols land on reels 1, 3, and 5, awarding 7 free spins. Before free spins start, the Bugsy's Special feature spins a mini-slot consisting of 3 shot glasses. This lands a combination of three of these modifiers:

• Bonus Spins – 1, 2, or 3 additional free spins are added to the awarded tally.
• Remove Small-Time Symbol – J, Q, K or A symbols are removed from the reels for free spins.
• Locked Wilds – all wilds that land during the round remain locked until the feature ends.
• Super Wild – up to two 1x4-sized Super Wilds can possibly land on a free spin on reels 2 and 4.
• Wins Multiplier – awards a multiplier of x2, x3, or x5. Multipliers apply to all wins during the round.

It is possible to win the same modifier more than once, though there are limits which are detailed in the extensive rules section of the paytable. For example, multipliers stack when they are awarded more than once but up to a maximum of x10. Landing 3 scatters on the final free spin of the feature retriggers 7 free spins, and a retrigger of Bugsy's Special. If the Win Multiplier, Locked Wilds, Super Wilds, and Remove Small-Time Symbols have maxed out, Bugsy's Special only awards additional free spins.

Bugsy's Bar: Slot Verdict

Hey ho, there you go, not a bad wee speakeasy, bootleggin', crime in the earlier part of the 20th-century style slot to while away a bit of time on. It's easy, handsomely presented, and potentially lucrative should the shot glasses pour their bounty just so. That probably won't happen in the base game since it's modifier-free. Oh sure, technically, a decent line win or two might trundle along, but no modifiers means it might be a fairly uneventful journey. If you like the theme, though, Bugsy's Bar's main game shouldn't be too dull, thanks to the jazzy looks and sounds. It's all a little livin' on the wrong side of the law and having a bit of fun while doing so spirit of the age thing.

Since the base game can be pretty uneventful, making it to the bonus round is that little bit more exciting when it finally does trigger. Then, Bugsy gets the chance to flex his hospitality skills by pouring some modifiers onto the reels. Those on tap: win multipliers, full reel wilds, sticky wilds, and low symbol removals are standard slot extras, but standard for a good reason since they can get pulses racing when they're doing something special. For Bugsy's Bar, this means wins as high as 26,670x the bet, which is quite a haul, a metaphorical full swag bag, if you will.

Back in the day, Alan Parker wrote and directed 'Bugsy Malone', a humorous musical gangster film starring Scott Baio and Jodie Foster, where everyone in it was a kid, and the guns fired whipped cream instead of bullets. Sounds bizarre, but it actually made number 353 on Empire's 500 greatest movies of all time list. Perhaps it's a complete coincidence that Bugsy's Bar shares a similar name, perhaps not. What's our point? Not sure, but while the test run went okay, and Bugsy's Bar came across as a textbook Red Tiger release with sizable winning potential, it's arguable how high up any top 500 lists it would make.