Play Bounty Pop free in the demo above before reading on. The November 2020 AvatarUX release sits as the 4th installation of the PopWins original series \u2014 and the first to break the seven-row free-spins ceiling that PopRocks, WildPops and CherryPop lived under.<\/p>\n
Bounty Pop pairs that nine-row upgrade with a four-tier Mystery Wheel ladder and one notable departure from the formula: there are no wild symbols at all, even from pops.<\/p>\n
We walk through what the upgrade adds and what the wild-symbol omission costs the bonus economy below, and where this fits in the wider video slots category<\/a>.<\/p>\n Bounty Pop launched on 30 November 2020 from AvatarUX, the Malta-based studio with creative ties to Hong Kong, partnered with Yggdrasil Gaming via the YGS Masters program. The title is the fourth slot in AvatarUX’s PopWins-original lineup<\/a> after PopRocks, WildPops and CherryPop.<\/p>\n The premise is a cartoon-arcade pirate spin: a colour-coded crew on a treasure run, with a masked man in white as the lone super-high symbol. Five of him on a payline pays ten times the stake, capping the paytable’s character roster.<\/p>\n The lower-pay band is built from J-A card royals styled in florescent Gothic script. The premium pay band runs orange, red, purple, violet, blue and green pirates, plus a thief-girl and the pirate captain. There are no wild symbols anywhere in the design.<\/p>\n The grid starts on five reels and three rows. PopWins expansion can build the base game grid up to six rows tall, and free spins push the ceiling up to nine rows per reel.<\/p>\n Win-both-ways pays count combinations from left to right and right to left, doubling the 243 base ways into 486 starting ways and scaling up to 59,049 ways at the maximum nine-row layout.<\/p>\n Stakes run from $0.20 to $20 per spin. The default RTP sits at 96.2%, volatility is High, and the maximum win caps at 55,000\u00d7 the bet \u2014 second only to PopRocks within the original series. Hit frequency lands at 22.14%, roughly one paid spin in every five.<\/p>\n PopWins triggers on every winning combination. Winning symbols pop and are replaced by two new icons, expanding that reel’s row count by one. Chain wins together and the reels keep growing, up to a six-row maximum during the base game. Lose a spin and the reels reset to the starting three-row layout.<\/p>\n This is the same cascade engine you’ll find in Lollipop<\/a> and the wider PopWins family, but Bounty Pop runs it without the wild-symbol layer. The omission keeps the focus on raw symbol matching.<\/p>\n The Mystery Wheel is the headline differentiator and unlocks at row thresholds rather than randomly. Reach all reels at six rows in the base game and the Base Mystery Wheel triggers \u2014 outer ring offers \u00d72, \u00d73 or \u00d75 multipliers plus arrow gateways to an inner ring of \u00d73 to \u00d710.<\/p>\n The free spins round opens up the Bronze, Silver and Gold tier wheels at seven, eight and nine rows respectively. Each tier scales the inner-ring multiplier higher.<\/p>\n The ultimate Golden Wheel at full nine-row expansion features nine symbols with multipliers running \u00d73 to \u00d7100. The chosen multiplier applies once to the total bonus-round win.<\/p>\n Three, four or five scatter symbols anywhere on the reels trigger six, nine or twelve free spins respectively. Before the spins start, an optional Gamble Wheel offers the chance to add more spins \u2014 at the risk of losing the entire bonus.<\/p>\n The free spins round behaves differently from the base game. Reels can expand to nine rows tall, and the grid does not fully reset on losing spins. Instead it adjusts down to the least-expanded reel height, which is what makes the higher Mystery Wheel tiers reachable.<\/p>\n Bonus Buy unlocks direct entry to the free spins round at 75\u00d7 the stake, well within the standard PopWins-series range. The buy isolates the bonus economy, so the return depends on free-spin RTP rather than base-game RTP.<\/p>\nGame Overview<\/h2>\n
Slot Mechanics and Bonus Features<\/h2>\n
PopWins Cascade<\/h3>\n
Mystery Wheel \u2014 Four-Tier Ladder<\/h3>\n
Free Spins and Gamble Wheel<\/h3>\n
Bonus Buy<\/h3>\n