Canyon Riches

Canyon Riches: Slot Overview

One of the most popular themes in gambling has caught the eye of software provider AvatarUX, and the studio has gone and designed the subterranean online slot Canyon Riches. The theme is mining, and sooner or later, a good chunk of casino game makers find themselves down in the earth setting up rocks for players to break. In the case of Canyon Riches, breaking rocks leads to a larger gaming area and more space to link ways wins or collect sweet, sweet nuggets.

Online slot mine holes really do seem like swell places to work. Forget dirt, sweat, and the threat of cave-ins; jaunty audiovisuals and an even jauntier mining character make heading beneath the ground to try one's luck an uplifting proposal. Never more so than in Canyon Riches, which pairs a right swell soundtrack with a dude in a hard hat who looks like a friendly uncle who's always happy, smiling, and does that magic trick where he pulls a coin out from behind little kids' ears. Hopefully, he's going to help players pull more than a single sparkling coin out from this shaft, but.

In classic AvatarUX fashion, Canyon Riches has a gaming grid that grows, shrinks, and unlocks as play unfolds. Its default size at the start of each base game spin is 5x3, where there are 243 ways to win. As rows are unlocked by TNT detonations, the grid grows and the number of ways to win increases. At full capacity, Canyon Riches transforms into a 5x6 grid with 7,776 ways to win. At the start, the top 3 rows are covered in rocks that need to be smashed away. Beware a smashing from the slot's highly volatile math model, though, where 95.97% to 96.03% is the RTP. The stake range is 10 c to $/€300 per spin, and activating the ante bet triples the chance of entering the bonus by adding 50% to the base stake.

Winning combinations pay for landing 3 to 5-of-a-kind, and hitting 5 matching J-A card ranks awards players 1.2 times their bet. Players collect 2 to 5 times the stake when 5 bags, canaries, boots, lamps, or nugget carts land across the reels.

Canyon Riches: Slot Features

Potential pathways to Canyon Riches' riches are breaking open its locked rows with TNT boosters, collecting nugget values with Pickaxes, triggering free spins, or buying bonus features.

Locked Rows

The top three rows in the game are locked and can be unlocked by landing TNT booster symbols. A TNT symbol unlocks a row and spawns 1-3 wilds randomly on the grid. It also transforms into a wild. Wild symbols substitute all symbols except scatters.

Collect Feature

Landing nuggets and a Pickaxe symbol on the reels triggers the collect feature, which collects all of the cash values from nuggets. Cash nuggets display a multiplier, while mystery nuggets reveal a reward when they are collected by a Pickaxe. When collected, these rewards are a multiplier of x2, x3, or x5, which gets applied to all cash nuggets in view.

Free Spins

Landing 3 scatters triggers the free spins feature. In the bonus game, unlocked rows remain unlocked for the full round's duration, and they persistently increase the global multiplier. TNT increases the global multiplier when it unlocks locked rows. Each scatter landing in the feature awards +1 free spin.

Xpress

At the Xpress, players can buy a Pickaxe Spin that guarantees a Pickaxe lands at a cost of 25x the bet or a TNT spin guaranteeing TNT lands for 15x the bet. In addition, a 10 free spins bonus round can be bought for 60x the bet or a 15 free spins Bonus Max at 250x.

Canyon Riches: Slot Verdict

Not a whole lot of time ago, AvatarUX found itself dealing with chunks of gold stuff in the online slot Nugget, though that one was an above-ground Western. Canyon Riches is a firmly below-ground adventure, and the studio has designed a cheerful grotto for gamblers to spin reels and see what might happen. The reel area itself was not the easiest thing in the world to look at, on account of the rocks covering locked rows not integrating overly well with the graphics behind them but rather looking sort of awkwardly plonked on top. TNT helpfully clears that stuff away, not only giving your eyes a break but opening up the gaming area so more good stuff can potentially take place. This part of Canyon Riches brought Fire in the Hole xBomb to mind as the two slots share a vaguely similar grid-growing activity as well as theme.

Canyon Riches is the less complicated slot, however, for better or for worse, depending on player preference. Put simply, land TNT to unlock reels, hit matching symbol combinations, and collect prizes from nugget symbols when Pickaxes also hit. Interestingly, during the review, far bigger titillation came from opening up the reels and hitting chunky winning combinations than collecting nugget prizes. It's hard to say how nugget symbol wins may compare since no upper limit to their value was provided on the paytable. However lucky players manage to achieve it, Canyon Riches has a maximum winning potential of 20,000x the stake, which is quite a haul of bullion, though if big numbers and big gameplay are a must, it's hard to look past slots like Dead Canary or those in the Fire in the Hole series.

Despite the happy mining chap and the laid-back straw chewin' tune, Canyon Riches wasn't a slot that made an explosive first impression. Perhaps it was a combination of theme commonality and so-so graphics. But Canyon Riches got better as the session progressed, and the one-two-punch combination of TNT row unlocking and a large number of ways to win could be a good one.