Piranha Pays

Theme and Design

A Homely Setting But What's That In The Fish Tank

Piranha Pays is a humorous slot game from Play n Go featuring an old man who buys a pet piranha. This high variance slot plays on a 5x4 reel set which expands to 8 rows high with 50 paylines in the free spins round. Random multipliers up to 10x and instant win prizes of up to 20x are available in the base game. In the bonus round there are 4 stages of a trail to complete, and if you finish them all, you’ll trigger the 5,000x max payout.

RTP and Variance

Piranha Pays has five available RTP settings – 96.2%, 94.2%, 91.2%, 87.2% and 84.2%. To avoid getting short-changed by playing at one of the lower rates – some slot sites really do run these games at less than 90% RTP – always check the game info screen before spending your money by hitting the ‘?’ under the reels and scrolling down until you here Return to Player.

I recommend playing at MrQ from Lindar Media where slots like this one consistently run at the maximum RTP.

This is one of Play n Go’s more volatile games with a high variance rating, so the win distribution will be uneven. Choose a sensible stake accordingly or you may get burned!

Maximum Win

Piranha Pays comes in with a max payout of 5,000x which is somewhat disappointing for a high variance game. Play n Go have many other games with much higher max wins you can try including the excellent Kiss: Reels of Rock (50,000x). If you stick with this one then your max from a 10p bet would be £500.

Symbols and Paytable

The games starts on a 5 reel and 4 row grid with 30 paylines to win across. Wins are triggered in the standard way by landing 3 or more identical symbols across paylines from left to right, starting at the left most reel. However, you can expand that grid to 5 rows, 6 rows, 7 rows or 8 rows, to give yourself 35, 40, 45 or 50 paylines in total. More on that in the next part.

There is good value towards the top of the paytable and plenty of multipliers to boost your wins too. There are 9 symbols in all. The low payers are the cards, Jack, Queen, King and Ace. These are valued at from 0.1x for 3 Jacks up to 2x for 5 Aces. The premiums are the food items, biscuits, cakes, fried eggs, pies and ham. These are valued at from 0.3x for 5 biscuits up to 20x for 5 ham.

There are wilds too, represented by the sharp-toothed piranha fish in greens, blue, pinks and oranges. These substitute for any pay symbol to complete win ways.

Features and Gameplay

The gameplay here is simple. You have win multipliers, mystery instant wins and free spins. Here is how each feature works.

Win Multipliers Of Up To 10x 

The win multiplier appears in a jam jar above the reels, top right. It randomly activates to display a multiplier value on any spin in the base game and free spins rounds. The multiplier values may be 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, 6x, 7x, 8x, 9x or 10x and apply to ALL wins on that spin.

Mystery Instant Win Of Up To 20x 

To trigger free spins you need to land 3 scatters. But if you get a near miss of two scatters without the third then a Mystery Instant Win may trigger instead. This will drop onto reel 5 to reveal a prize of 5x, 10x, 15x or 20x. That’s a nice bit of compensation!

Free Spins With Trail and Expanding Reels

The main even is the free spins round. And it’s a good one thanks to a trail feature and expanding reel set that takes the reel set up to 8 rows deep to give you 50 paylines.

The round starts by landing 3 scatter symbols, represented by the food can symbol. Your 3 cans need to land on reel 1, 3 and 5. That gets you 10 spins. Once you the round begins you start on a free spins trail displayed above the reels, levelling up each time 3 more scatters are collected. You also get a piranha wild that remains on the reels, moving position with each spin and growing in size.

These are the four levels:

• 1^st Level – Extra 5 spins on 5 reels, 5 rows and 35 paylines, and a standard piranha wild at 1x1
• 2^nd Level – Extra 5 spins on 5 reels, 6 rows and 40 paylines, and a piranha wild at 2x2
• 3^rd Level - Extra 5 spins on 5 reels, 7 rows and 45 paylines, and a piranha wild at 3x3
• 4^th Level - Extra 5 spins on 5 reels, 8 rows and 50 paylines, and a piranha wild at 4x4
• Landing 3 scatters at 4^th Level – 5,000x max payout