Santa Surprise is one of Playtech’s slot machines. The game has a design that you will love if you enjoy the winter holidays, themed around Santa and all the typical things that make this period a special one, from the Christmas stockings, to the presents, bells, Christmas trees and all sorts of other goodies. The slot certainly goes into holiday mode here, as it is heavily themed around Christmas. There is a lot of competition around Christmas as a topic for slot machines, but that’s just because people love getting into the spirit of the holiday, so they tend to play these types of games as well. You don’t see the same happening for Easter or Thanksgiving though.
With 5 reels, Santa Surprise offers on them 20 paylines and a collection of feature symbols that includes bonuses, scatters and wilds, resulting in free spins and multipliers, among other things. It gives up to $200,000 as its biggest prize.
Features of Santa Suprise
Three different symbols have special roles in Santa Surprise, including the scatter symbol, the wild and the bonus symbol. They can give you free spins and multipliers.
Santa Claus is the slot’s wild feature. As usual, the wild substitutes for another symbol, if its position in that round is the right one for that to happen. That means getting the symbol on a bet line where there are a few matching symbols already, so that the wild can add the missing ingredient for a new combination. It only substitutes for regular symbols, not for the bonus or scatter. The same wild is capable of giving its own prizes away, if it happens that two to five Santa Claus icons form a combo on the same active line, and starting from the leftmost reel.
A snow covered house is in the symbol that has the scatter ability. This ability allows it to appear in random locations in the game, and as long as it’s all in the same spin, you get prizes of two kinds from it. 2+ scattered Houses gets you a cash prize, the range being 2x to 500x the triggering bet.
Free Games Feature
Another reward offered by the scatter is the free spins feature. You can win 10 spins for free and x3 multipliers for all their prizes, as long as you get 3+ symbols during the same round.
Christmas Gifts Bonus
The Christmas Tree is another part about this slot that is special. It’s the bonus symbol, with three or more symbols being needed in order to trigger the Christmas Gifts bonus feature. You are taken to a special moment during the holidays, Christmas morning, when you have to choose out of the six presents that are under the tree. It gets better though, as once you do that you can pick another three gifts, so you take four total out of the six that are there. Best Christmas ever, right?
Betting options and jackpots
The betting range in Santa Surprise is between $0.01 and $20 per line, where up to 10 coins can be used. The value of one coin is $2 at its highest. As for the total bet, it is composed of up to 20 line bets, meaning that it has an upper limit of $400.
The jackpot awarded in Santa Surprise is fairly typical for Playtech, giving the player 10,000x the line wager, which in this case means a maximum value of $200,000.
Design and symbols
The game has a classic Christmas theme, meaning that it uses a gorgeous combination of red and white, the red being the one that stands out the most. The red background image has a cheerful logo at the top, there is snow sprinkled at the top of the reels and the betting buttons, plus you even get themed playing card icons, which have candles and Christmas themed clothing on them.
Symbols: Santa Claus (wild, 10,000x), Christmas Tree (bonus), House (scatter, 500x the bet), Bells (500x), Christmas Stocking (400x), Gift (200x), Ace (150x), King (125x), Queen (100x), Jack (75x) and 10 (50x).
Is It Worth Playing?
While the game is not quite good enough to play at just any occasion, if the winter holidays are right around the corner I’d definitely recommend it to help you get into the right mood for them.
The Santa Suprise slot machine is offered through the Playtech platform, so if you want to play it for real or just to practice, look out for casinos that use it.
