Hot Potato

Theme and Design

A Great Looking Game With A Fun And Unusual Theme

From the title alone, you might be expecting a slot set in a farm, or a kitchen. However, the base game of this slot takes you to the busy streets of New York. You’re surrounded by skyscrapers and yellow cabs. Only during the free spins round do you enter the kitchen, where you’re responsible for cooking up all kinds of fast food staples (including fries - hence the name). 

It’s a beautifully executed theme, with crisp, clean graphics and a nice change of pace from the base game to the bonus round.

RTP and Variance

Hot Potato has a pretty great 96.16% RTP alongside high volatility. This means you should see some big wins in longer gaming sessions, but will also experience some dry spells. If you have a very tight play budget then consider a slot with slightly lower volatility. Blinged by Play n Go is a good New York themed alternative with medium volatility.

Maximum Win

Hot Potato has a top payout of 10,000x your bet which is neither super generous, nor is it stingy. If you’re chasing enormous jackpots then you might be a little disappointed, but in our experience, most people would be pretty happy to land that max win!

If you want to stick to the New York theme but be in with the chance of a bigger win then try The Bowery Boys. This slot invites you to join a safe-cracking New York gang and has a 25,000x max win.

Symbols and Paytable

Hot Potato is played on a 7x7 grid with a cluster pays mechanic. This means that instead of making wins on set paylines, you just need to land 5 or more matching symbols that are adjacent to each other either horizontally or vertically.

There are 6 pay symbols in this game, plus a wild symbol and a scatter that we’ll cover in more detail soon. The low paying symbols are the cucumber, donut, and soda, these payout from 0.2x your bet for 5 cucumbers, up to 25x your bet for 25+ sodas. The premium symbols are the fries, burger, and chef. These pay out between 0.4x your bet for 5x fries, up to 100x your bet for 25+ chefs.

Features and Gameplay

While it’s not bursting with unusual mechanics, Hot Potato does bring together a handful of neat features that accentuate the gameplay brilliantly. Let’s take a look at how they all work.

Avalanche‍s After Every Win

Whenever a win is created, the avalanche feature triggers. All of the winning symbols are removed and new symbols fall into their place. These can form new winning clusters, restarting the avalanche feature every time they do. The avalanche feature will only stop when no more new winning combinations are created.

Wilds, Explosions and Multipliers

The wild symbol is represented by the baked potato itself. It can substitute for any of the pay symbols in the game to help create winning clusters.

As well as this, at random - and this happened a lot in testing - the wild symbol can explode from within a cluster or just any other position on the grid, removing all symbols in a surrounding 3x3 area to trigger a further cascade. All positions in the 3x3 area then also take on a multiplier value of 2x.

Now, if ANOTHER potato wild symbol explodes and the grid it creates covers existing multipliers then those multipliers double in size. This can happen again and again up to a maximum value of 128x. Better still, if more than one multiplier is part of the same winning cluster then their multipliers are added together before being applied to the win. 

Free Spins With Sticky Multipliers

If you land three scatter symbols then the free spins round begins. You begin with 10 free spins but can gather more by landing 3 additional scatter symbols at any point in the free spins round. Any multiplier grids are sticky during the game, meaning they stay active throughout all of your free spins. This gives you a brilliant opportunity to create even bigger wins.