Bigger Bass Bonanza is the first true sequel in the Big Bass franchise, built by Reel Kingdom for Pragmatic Play’s platform in September 2021. It keeps the original’s fishing loop and grows the playfield to 5×4 with 12 fixed paylines and money symbols worth up to 4,000x your bet.
The First Sequel in the Big Bass Franchise
Big Bass Bonanza arrived in December 2020 and became the most recognisable fishing slot in the business. Nine months later came this follow-up, built to a one-line brief: change nothing, enlarge everything.
The formula is four numbers. Rows go from three to four, paylines from 10 to 12, the maximum win from 2,100x to 4,000x, and volatility from a 4-out-of-5 rating to a full 5. Every later entry in the franchise borrows from this template, which now spans more than thirty titles across the wider Pragmatic Play slots catalogue.
The scenery gets a glow-up too: the calm lake of the original gives way to a palm-lined shoreline with neon-lit buildings and an electro-80s soundtrack — more beach party than quiet morning on the water.
Money Symbols and the Base Game
Line wins pay left to right across the 12 paylines. The paytable splits into a familiar ladder:
- 10–A card royals — the low tier, paying 10x your bet for five of a kind
- Tackle box, lure and fishing rod — the mid-to-high tier, worth 50x and upward for a full line
- Fishing boat — the premium symbol at 200x for five, and the only one that pays from just two symbols (0.5x)
The real draw is the money symbols — bass carrying randomly assigned cash values. They land throughout the base game, but only pay here when you complete a full line of five. The base game fishes with a line, not a net.
The fourth row quietly matters. Twenty symbol positions instead of fifteen means every spin shows more fish, so the money-symbol economy runs denser than in the original — a structural edge most reviews skip.
Free Spins and the Wild Collection Meter
Landing three, four or five jumping-bass scatters awards 10, 15 or 20 free spins — the game’s only bonus feature, and where everything it is known for happens.
The fisherman wild appears exclusively during free spins, and he is the net the base game withholds: when he lands alongside money symbols, he collects every visible cash value at once. Among fishing-style bonus rounds, this collect-everything wild remains the franchise’s signature move.
Wilds also accumulate on a meter above the reels. Every fourth wild retriggers the feature with 10 additional spins and an escalating collection multiplier — 2x, then 3x, then 10x. After three retriggers the meter locks.
That meter is the real max-win engine: a single elusive bass can carry up to 4,000x by itself, and deep retrigger runs are how sessions approach the cap.
RTP, Volatility and the Version Problem
The default return to player is 96.71% — comfortably above the 96% mark most players treat as the dividing line, and unusually generous for a slot with this much top-end potential.
The catch: 96.71% is the default, not a guarantee. The same game also ships in 95.67% and 94.62% configurations, and each operator picks which version to deploy.
Checking takes thirty seconds: open the in-game paytable screen, find the RTP line, and confirm the figure before staking. We apply the same default-version standard when ranking the highest-paying slots on the site.
Volatility sits at the top of the scale — 5 out of 5 — with a 12.11% hit frequency, roughly one winning spin in every 8.26. Long dry stretches between triggers are part of the design, not bad luck.
Bigger Bass Bonanza Demo Mode
The free demo runs the full game — same reels, same feature, play-money balance. We recommend it more strongly than usual here, because 5/5 volatility is something you want to feel before funding it.
Watch how long the meter takes to bank four wilds and what the multiplier does to a collection. Our slots collection offers free play versions of every game we review.
Our Verdict
Bigger Bass Bonanza earns its name the boring, effective way: the same game, four numbers bigger. For players who found the original’s 2,100x ceiling modest, the sequel’s 4,000x cap and full-throttle volatility are exactly the upgrade requested.
It will not convert anyone the original left cold — the feature set is identical down to the retrigger rhythm. Put the RTP version check on your pre-play list; the gap between 96.71% and 94.62% is the difference between above-average and below.
As the blueprint for every Bigger entry that followed, though, this is the cleanest place to understand what the franchise became.
