Lucky New Year is a new online slot from Maltese designers of mobile-optimized HTML 5 slot games Pragmatic Play. Like a high number of slots added to Pragmatic’s portfolio, it takes on a traditional theme – the Chinese New Year. Released in 2018, the year of the Dog in Chinese Zodiac, this slot game was launched to celebrate the occasion as well as people born under the sign of the dog. It also provides enjoyment to anyone with an interest in Chinese holidays.
With the distinct look of an Asian online slot game and the sounds of folk instruments happily playing in the background, the Lucky New Year video slot is a simple but stimulating game that doesn’t draw your attention away from the task at hand. The format of the machine is fairly standard, letting you play with 5 reels, 3 rows of symbols and 25 fixed paylines. And since it’s a game aimed at a region known for its high rollers, this particular slot also allows you to spend big sums of money during your sessions.
No matter how deep your pockets run, Lucky New Year can give you value with its profitable pay table and bonus features. Armed with 3 progressive jackpots, cash bonuses, free spins, and 3x3 symbols, this game will give you the tools you want to turn a small investment into a big payout.
You can uncover the fortunes hiding in this slot game no matter whether you want to play with a small budget or splurge thousands within minutes. The stakes start at 0.01 credits per payline, or 0.25 credits for a spin when you play with only 1 coin per line. But you also have the option to increase the number of coins up to 10 and bet up to 0.5 credits per line, which will give you a max bet of 125 credits.
Given it was the dog that was celebrated at the time of the slot’s release, it’s natural to see this symbol being awarded the most value. Not only is the golden dog symbol a wild card that can substitute for all other symbols apart from the scatter and bonus trigger, but it can also pay rewards of 25-500x your coin size when you get 3, 4, or 5 of the symbols on any available payline. The same rewards are also offered by the Chinese dragon symbol.
Other thematic symbols you can find in this slot are the firecrackers, drums, and mandarin oranges, which give returns of 10-400x your coin value, according to the type and number of symbols collected on a payline. But if none of these symbols appear in the required numbers, you also have the standard card symbols to hope for (Ace-King-Queen-Jack), which can pay you 5-50x your line bet for a single combination of 3, 4, or 5 matching cards.
Another special picture symbol you can see on your reels is the scatter, which can only land on reels 1, 3, and 5 to trigger 5 free spins. The free spins are triggered when 3 scatter symbols appear on the selected reels, in which case you’ll also get to win a bonus payout of 1x your total bet. The free spins rounds use a special set of reels, in which the first and fifth reel spin per usual while the second, third and fourth reels spin together as one giant symbol that spans across 3 reels and 3 rows of symbols. These extra spins can be retriggered indefinitely by getting 3 more scatters during the bonus feature – only each time you do so, the game will award you 3 extra spins instead of 5.
The final bonus you can win in this lucky slot machine is the Money Respin feature. This is activated by the special lantern symbols which appear on the reels with various prizes written on top of them. If 6 or more land on your screen during a spin, you will trigger the Money Respin bonus round where your collected lanterns, together with their prizes, will be added.
This bonus feature removes all symbols from the game and only leaves lantern symbols and empty spaces. In the beginning, you get 3 respins to play – these start with your collected lanterns already in their positions. During each respin, the empty positions on the screen can do get filled, your respin counter is reset back to 3.
This bonus game ends when you spend all your respins or fill up all the positions on the screen. If all 15 positions are filled, the slot will award the Grand jackpot prize. But if not, you will get to collect all the cash prizes you’ve won during the game.
Being an online slot, Lucky New Year is available both as a free game as well as a real money online slot game. If you want to spend some time to review the slot’s features before spending money, or even if you just want to practice your slot-playing strategy, using the free version of the game would be a great option. You can play for free at our recommended Pragmatic Casino as well as our own website where other demo games can also be found.
However, the only way you can make some real cash with this slot is through an online casino site where the game is offered. To get started with playing for real cash, you need to spare a minute or two to register an account with a casino, followed by another couple of minutes to deposit some money with the help of your debit/credit, prepaid card, or e-wallet. As a rule of thumb, most casinos won’t charge you any fees to process your money, and they will make it possible for you to play almost instantly after sending a deposit request.
Lucky New Year isn't the only game from Pragmatic Play that has bonus cash games, 3x3 symbols, free spins rounds, and similar betting limits. More than a few months before the slot was released, Pragmatic Play launched the Wolf Gold slot game, which is exactly alike apart from its visuals. But everything else is the same, including the bet sizes, the extras, and the jackpots. So, if you like what you see here but want a Native American theme instead of a Chinese one, you might want to try our free Wolf Gold slot machine. And if you want the same game all over again but with a Mexican theme, you can also check out Pragmatic Play’s Chilli Heat.
Lucky New Year is quite a decent slot game that gives its punters a good range of bets to choose from and a fair RTP of 96%. It certainly has bonus features worth triggering, especially the Money Respin game which always gives you something to look forward to. And since the slot is almost identical to two other slots with different themes, you also have alternatives if you get tired of the traditional holiday sights and sounds.
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