If you've ever wondered what the Pragmatic Play and Reel Kingdom teams get up to when they're not designing online slots, there is a chance they bust out classic board games and engage in some friendly competition. Maybe not, but since Snakes & Ladders Snake Eyes is the second Snakes & Ladders slot to roll off the production line, suspicions arose. And hey, people have been throwing dice, moving tokens around a board, scooting up ladders and down snakes in one form or another for hundreds of years. The earliest incarnation is said to be Moksha Patam, invented in ancient India to, among other things, showcase the concepts of Moksha and Karma.
If you were wondering, Moksha refers to freeing the soul from the Wheel of Samsara, otherwise known as the cycle of birth and death, thereby attaining a state of infinite bliss. Pretty heavy stuff for a game which is now seen as a simple race to the final square, where ladders scoot players closer to their goal while snakes send them back a number of spaces. Snakes & Ladders Snake Eyes leans towards the more mundane side of life than the transcendental and uses the classic board game when the bonus round is triggered. Till then, the action takes place on a 5x3 grid with 10 paylines for landing winning combinations across. Like its predecessor, Snakes & Ladders Snake Eyes takes place outside by a waterfall, but its increased pixel count has smoothed out the graphical edges. There's still a somewhat dated feel to the look, but it seems a lot less 8-Bit than it did before.
Numerically, some things have changed, and some things have stayed the same. One set of digits which have changed, and not for the better, is RTP, dropping to a maximum value of 96.08%. As for volatility, it remains the same with its high rating (5 out of 5), while potential remains unchanged as well. Getting started means picking a stake of 20 p/c to $/€100 per spin, while any device is suitable for some Snakes & Ladders-inspired activity.
Until the board is whipped out for the bonus round, players collect a win when at least three matching symbols land across consecutive reels on a payline, starting from the leftmost reel. Nine pay symbols are used, divided into 10-A card royals, then eyes peering out of baskets, snakes, bananas, and gorillas. Landing a five-symbol winning line pays 5-10 times the bet for the card icons and 15 to 50 times the stake for premium tiles. Wild Dice symbols are next, landing on all reels to substitute for any normal pay symbol. When Wild Dice hit, they show 1, 2, or 3 dots, representing a multiplier of x1, x2, or x3, which is applied to the total win of the spin. If Wild Dice make winning lines of themselves, a five-of-a-kind hit pays 50 times the bet.
Landing 3, 4, or 5 scatter symbols triggers the Snakes & Ladders Board Bonus with 12, 14, or 16 dice rolls, respectively. If triggered by 4 or 5 scatter symbols, there is a chance one of the symbols turns into a Snake Bonus symbol, awarding 2 extra dice rolls. The bonus game is played on a 12x12-sized board with 144 squares. Players, represented by a monkey token, begin on square number one. At the start, random items are placed on the grid's squares, such as bet multipliers of 4x to 100x, total win multipliers, ladders, snakes, and bananas. Now, 2 dice are rolled per turn, up to the number of dice rolls awarded, and players move around the board. If a 1-1 is rolled, +1 more roll is awarded. When landing on a square with one of these items on it, the corresponding actions occur:
Randomly, a square may have a hidden rope charmer, which, when landed on, the monkey is moved to an arbitrary higher position on the board. The round ends when no rolls are left, or players make it to square 144. Then the total amount collected is paid. Moreover, the bonus round has a minimum win of 20x the bet. If less than this is achieved at the end, the monkey goes into Rage Mode and moves to the end of the grid, collecting all values and multipliers along the way. The total of all multipliers is applied to the final prize amount. In Rage Mode, the monkey ignores ladders, snakes, bananas, or rope charmers.
When the monkey reaches square 144, the round ends, but there is a chance of a retrigger. Two dice are rolled, and if they show a double (1-1, 2-2, 3-3, 4-4, 5-5, or 6-6), the bonus is retriggered with the same number of starting rolls. Also, if any double is rolled during the round, a section of the snake at the top of the reels is filled. When all four sections get filled, one bonus retrigger is awarded.
Your guess is as good as ours as to why Pragmatic Play and Reel Kingdom felt the need to create Snakes & Ladders Snake Eyes. Perhaps if it was radically different to the original game, it might have made more sense. Then again, maybe the studios were responding to feedback over Snakes & Ladders Megadice, which resulted in a follow-up with its slightly altered rules and new look. Was Snakes & Ladder Megadice so popular it warranted a lightly made-over sequel? It might be hard to envisage, perhaps, but here we are; however it is that we managed to end up here.
There isn't a whole lot to add that wasn't already noted down in the previous Snakes & Ladders review, really. The graphics have been modernised, if that's the right word, or let's just say the chunky 8-Bit thing is gone, giving the game a more refined look than they often have from Pragmatic Play/Reel Kingdom team-ups. What else? Wild dice dots filling the snake segments triggering the bonus round when filled has been shifted, so it now appears in the actual bonus round. Oh, and the skyscraper has been replaced by a rope charmer. Other than those things, this is more or less the same Snakes and Ladders with gambling experience as before; even max win has stayed unchanged at 5,300x the bet.
Snakes & Ladders Snake Eyes might have been less puzzling if the makers had injected more obviously newer parts in while they were crafting it. The graphics are probably better suited to players unimpressed by the former one's retro angle, but other than that, Snakes & Ladders Snake Eyes delivers more or less the same sort of action as before.
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