Bonanza Megaways Slot Online from Big Time Gaming

Bonanza is the gold-mining pokie that Big Time Gaming released in December 2016, and the game that made the Megaways engine an industry standard. Six reels each show between two and seven symbols, and the count changes on every spin, so the ways to win move with it up to a maximum of 117,649. A horizontal reel of four mine carts sits above reels two to five, adding one symbol to each of those positions and feeding the ways-to-win total. It also carries the wild.

The return is 96.00% at the default setting, and volatility is high. Wins land often enough through cascades, but the sums that justify the game come from the free spins round. Stakes run from NZ$0.20 to NZ$20 per spin, which is a low ceiling by modern standards and the main reason high-stakes players look elsewhere. There is no bonus buy and no jackpot.

Game symbols

Coloured gems are the premium symbols, with the diamond at the top. It is the one symbol that pays for two matches in a row rather than three. Card ranks from 9 to Ace are the low-paying icons. 

The wild is a bundle of dynamite, and it appears only in the mine carts on the horizontal reel above reels two to five. It never lands on the six main reels. It substitutes for everything except the scatters, which are four golden letters G, O, L and D.

Reactions

Megaways sets how many ways a spin pays. Reactions decide what happens next. Every symbol in a winning combination explodes, the symbols above drop into the gaps, fresh ones arrive from the carts on the right, and the process repeats until a spin produces no further wins. One spin can therefore pay several times over.

Free spins and the unlimited multiplier

Landing all four letters to spell GOLD on the main reels awards 12 free spins. Every scatter beyond the fourth on that triggering spin adds five more, so six scatters start the round with 22 spins.

Inside the round, the win multiplier begins at 1x and climbs by one after every reaction, with no upper cap. It does not reset between free spins, which is what allows a long chain of cascades to compound into the game's largest payouts. Retriggers work differently here as well. Scatters arrive as stacked gold bars in the carts above the reels, and three or four of them add 5 or 10 extra spins.

“Two things catch people out. The unlimited multiplier only runs during free spins, so nothing accumulates across cascades in the base game. And the RTP is not fixed at 96% everywhere, since some operators license a build closer to 94.3%. Open the game's info screen and study the rate before the first spin.”

Reactions and Megaways together make the base game entertaining without being repetitive, and the cart reel changes the maths of every spin. The uncapped multiplier gives the bonus round a solid max. win: current builds top out at 26,000x the stake, well above the 12,000x carried over from the original release.

The drawbacks are practical. Free spins are rare, and there is no way to buy them, so a session can run long between triggers. The NZ$20 maximum bet keeps the game away from high-stakes play. Base-game cascades tend to return small amounts, and the pause between symbols exploding and dropping feels slow once the novelty wears off. Players who want the same studio with a different rhythm can compare White Rabbit or the jackpot-linked Star Clusters Megapays. The game runs on HTML5, though the busy grid reads better on a large screen than on a phone.