Lumber Cats manages to explain its theme quite well with its title. This Microgaming slot machine gets as a theme a group of cats that work in the lumber industry. They cut wood, they load it up in trucks and so on, the entire game being built around the life of these rugged cats, living up in the mountains and working hard at cutting trees. It’s not a theme that I’ve seen before, so at least it’s original, even though it might not seem particularly fun or interesting.
With 20 paylines and 5 reels, Lumber Cats is average in that regard, but does better feature wise. It has two bonus games, triggered by scatter symbols, plus a wild and some free spins. Its biggest jackpot is valued at $15,000.
Features of Lumber Cats
If the theme choice didn’t seem that interesting to you, you will be happy to hear that the list of features definitely looks better. You get a wild symbol from it, two scatter symbols, two bonus games and free spins. No multipliers here, but the game still manages to be quite interesting.
First, we have the Lumber Cat. It’s a rugged tom cat, a redhead with an axe over his shoulder, with a checkered shirt, suspenders and a cigar in the corner of his mouth. This is the wild symbol, plus it is also the one that can award the top jackpot of Lumber Cats, worth 6,000x the line wager. As for its wild ability, it gives it the power to substitute for other symbols, as long as they’re not scatters.
Next, we have the Trees symbol, which is the first of the two scatters included in this game. It appears on all the reels, and you need between two and five of them to be present, in order to win a prize. The prize’s minimum value is 2x the total bet, while the maximum is at 200x.
Tree Climb Bonus Game
The Tree Climb feature starts whenever you have at least three Trees symbols on the reels. They can be placed anywhere, as they’re scatters and they don’t form regular combos. The feature is accompanied by a cash prize, as I mentioned above.
You choose one of the three cats that will try to climb trees. Depending on how well your cat does, you get a smaller or bigger prize from this feature.
Log-Roll Bonus Game
The second bonus game of Lumber Cats requires for the Log scatter symbol to be on the first and the fifth reels during the same spin, while the Lumber Cat wild is on the third reel.
At that point, you will notice that the 3rd reel wild expands, taking over the entire reel. You get 5 free spins, during which the Log symbols turn into wilds. The expanded wild on the 3rd reel remains in place until the free spins are over.
Betting options and jackpots
You are allowed to place bets on as many lines as you want, the limit being obviously 20 since that’s how many there are. You also choose the number of coins per line, between 1 and 10, plus the denomination, which is between $0.01 and $0.25. Add it all up, and you end up with $50 total bets, while line bets go up to $2.50.
The slot advertises on the paytable a top payout of 6,000x, which means up to 60,000 coins. With $0.25 coins used in the bet, the jackpot is worth $15,000.
Design and symbols
The developers did a fairly decent job at showing you the life of these lumber workers, which just happen to be cats. There are trees, wooden cabins, logs, cat workers and lots of playing cards that are made out of wood and painted in different colors. The background picture is a majestic image of the forests on a mountain.
Symbols: Lumber Cat (wild, 6,000x), Log (scatter), Trees (scatter, 200x bet), Sawing Cat (4,000x), Logging Cat (2,000x), Logging Truck (1,000x), Log Cabin (500x), Ace (200x), King (200x), Queen (150x), Jack (150x), 10 (100x) and 9 (100x).
Is It Worth Playing?
It does quite well with its features, the prizes are decent and the graphics are cute, so you should give it a try if the theme works for you.
The Lumber Cats slot machine is offered through the Microgaming platform, so if you want to play it for real or just to practice, look out for casinos that use it.
