Humankind's best friend, doggies, are back in a remake of one of Pragmatic Play's most beloved slots The Dog House, which also spawned a Megaways version titled The Dog House Megaways. This one, The Dog House Multihold, takes the newly made trilogy in a different direction. Although, like The Dog House Megaways, The Multihold version does come with a bunch more reels, rows, and ways to win when its bonus round is going well. One of The Dog House Multihold's key free spins tricks is unlocking up to four active reel sets at once. If you're keen to see a quad-grid iteration of The Dog House, feel free to grab a tick collar and join us for a look.
For a lot of the time, The Dog House Multihold looks very much like the original slot. That is, if you don't trigger or can't buy the bonus round and are powering your way through the base game. In this phase of play, the visuals have remained basically the same, meaning an outdoor scene with a 5-reel, 3-row game grid housed in its own wooden structure, parked up by a lawn. The creeping ivy, the little blue birdie, the white picket fence, it's all there, transporting players back to the original sleepy slice of suburbia for another canine adventure.
When it comes to stats, some have increased, some have decreased, but none mind-bendingly drastically so. One which has dropped a bit is the return to player value, where this time, the maximum default RTP comes in at 96.06%, though two lower settings have been created that can be verified on the paytable. Pragmatic Play has rated the volatility as 5 out of 5 and has bolted on a bonus buy, which might be as big of a draw for some players as the actual Multihold part, possibly.
With 20 fixed paylines, regular symbols trigger a win when three to five-of-a-kind land across one on adjacent reels from the leftmost side. Symbols are the same as before, too, so we get a return of the bulging 10-A card royals, a bone, a collar, and four cute doggy premiums. Landing a five-of-a-kind winning line pays 1.25 to 2.5 times the bet for the card symbols or 3.75 to 25x the bet for the rest. Wilds are as critical in The Dog House Multihold as they ever were before. Wilds appear on the three central reels, carrying a random multiplier of x2 or x3. Wilds substitute for any regular pay symbol and apply their multiplier to any win they are a part of. When more than one wild is part of a win, the multiplier values are added together.
So far, so uh, yeah, and? But, here's where The Dog House Multihold starts to diverge from its predecessors. First off, when 3 paw bonus symbols hit on reels 1, 3, and 5 in the base game, 2x the bet is paid, and players pick up 7 free spins.
Now, free spins are played on up to four 3x5 game grids. In the beginning, just one game grid is active. When paw bonus symbols land, they are collected on the next locked game matrix. When 3 bonus symbols have been collected, the next matrix is unlocked. Bonus symbols only land on the last unlocked game grid.
Fans of the previous slots will be pleased to know sticky wilds have been retained. So, whenever a wild symbol lands on the last unlocked matrix, it turns sticky and stays in position until the round comes to an end. Just as good, if not better, when a new grid is unlocked, it starts with the same sticky wilds in place as the last matrix. Also, every time a grid is unlocked, 1-3 additional free spins are randomly awarded. If two grids are unlocked on the same free spin, extra free spins are awarded two times, and wilds are copied to both new matrices.
Where available, The Dog House Multihold provides the chance to buy free spins for the cost of 100 times the stake. The maximum RTP when buying free spins is 96.08%.
When taking The Dog House Multihold for a walk through the base game, it's kinda hard to discern much, if any, difference between this and the original. It's as wacky, bright, and loveable as ever. One of The Dog House's key attributes was its cute canine charm, and all of that has come bounding back for The Dog House Multihold, which is as charming as ever. Fans of the original's homely, well-kept weed-free lawns and optimistic blue skies will feel right at home in The Dog House Multihold. The base game, at least.
Free spins are where the two games say sayonara to each other and head in different directions. How you view The Dog House Multihold's bonus round may largely rest on how you view these quad grid features in general. It isn't a massively populous genre yet, but Blueprint Gaming's handful of Power 4 Slots and Big Time Gaming's Slot Vegas Megaquads sprang to mind as possible competition. What feels fresh here is the way locked wilds from the previous grid copy over to a newly unlocked one. There are a few ways Pragmatic Play could have handled this aspect of the game, and seeing as locked multiplier wilds were what helped put The Dog House on the map, this step was critical. The method the team landed on for executing it, injecting a snowball element to the sticky wild accumulations on new grids, not letting new wilds stick on every previous grid, or starting new grids from scratch, is a clever approach.
Interestingly, having up to four times the free spins matrices hasn't translated into four times the winning potential due to the game's win cap of 9,000x the bet. Not a colossal amount more than the original and less than The Dog House Megaways for anyone keeping score. Is it gimmicky? Kinda, but it is also pretty exciting when a solid domino effect is happening in free spins as extra game grids open up and sticky wilds are transferred over. In summation, if you liked what the doggies have delivered so far, there's a good chance this one will be a good ol' tail wagger, too.
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