Benny the Beer Demo: Free Play and Review

A number tile and a question-mark tile

Stackways symbols come in two kinds. The Normal tile prints its value, 2, 3 or 4. The Revealing tile shows a question mark and turns out to hold 5 to 10, which is how a reel gets taller than the four rows it starts with. An active tile stacks whichever symbol on the board would then reach furthest across the reels. Equal candidates are split by chance, and a tile that cannot create a win leaves its reel alone.

Counters under the reels give the number of matching symbols on each, and the sign above the board prints their product. In that frame one camera, one, two, five and one make 10 ways, and ten ways of five cameras at 2.5x each paid 25x the stake. A smaller tile does the same job on a smaller scale: two Benny mugs on reel 1 turned a single line of three into two ways.

Our log saw 67 tiles on 60 of 500 base spins. Only 11 were the question-mark kind, and none of them went past 6. Stacked reels sat inside a paying way on 33 spins, and those spins alone made up €553.20 of the €755.40 in base-game line wins. Spin 304 paid the most, an ace across 72 ways for 50.4x the bet, from a symbol worth 0.7x for five.

Nine paying symbols and nothing to substitute

No Wild exists here, on the reels or in the paytable, so every base-game win needs the same picture three or more reels deep, starting on reel 1. Card letters J to A pay 0.1x, 0.3x and 0.7x the bet for three, four and five. Above them come a padlock, an alarm clock, a camera, a bomb and Benny himself, whose five of a kind pays 4x.

Those are modest numbers for a 10,000x slot, and the ways do the rest. In our log a K, worth 0.7x for five on a single way, paid 100.8x across 144 ways. In this slot the height of a stack counts for more than the picture on it.

Book of Stackways: two Specials that ignore the gap

Three FS scatters on a single base spin open the Book of Stackways, which lasts 10 free spins. A book on the screen names two of the nine paying symbols as Special symbols for the whole round. Whenever a Special shows up on three or more reels in one spin, indicators under those reels light up showing 2 to 10, and the reels are stacked with that many of it.

The useful rule sits one line lower in GAME INFO: stacked symbols pay as if the stacked reels were next to each other. A Special on reels 2, 3 and 4, or on 1, 3, 4 and 5, still pays as three or four of a kind, gap or no gap. With both Specials on three reels in the same spin, they stack and pay one after the other, the lower-paying symbol first.

A Book bought for €240.00 picked Q and the camera. One small Q stack paid €5.40 along the way, and on the ninth spin Q covered reels 1, 2, 3 and 5 at 3, 5, 3 and 3 while reel 4 stayed dark: 135 ways at the four-of-a-kind price, €81.00 in one go.

The round's Total Win was €115.40, 57.7x the stake, under half of what the card cost. None of its spins brought the two or three FS that would have added 2 or 4 more.

Four FS for the Super Book, which our log never saw

Super Book of Stackways plays by the same rules with four Special symbols instead of two, and gives 10 free spins when four FS land in one base spin. The same four inside a Book of Stackways also get there: the round upgrades on the spot and adds 4 spins to what is left. When several Specials qualify on one spin, they stack and pay in turn from the cheapest upwards, so one spin can pay more than one stacked win.

Our 500 spins never got that far. Two FS showed up on 21 of them and three only on the two that opened a Book, which leaves GAME INFO and the buy card as the sources for this section.

Benny was a Special in both of our books

Our logged run is 500 paid spins at €2.00, played on Hacksaw's demo server by a script that saved each reply. Both natural bonuses were the ordinary Book, with the mug among the two Special symbols each time.

The first Book came early, on spin 65, with the padlock and Benny. Its second free spin stacked padlocks over reels 1 to 4 for 72 ways and €144.00, on the way to a round total of 130x the bet. The second, on spin 391, drew K and Benny. K filled all five reels for 144 ways and €201.60, then Benny paid €180.00 on reels 1, 3, 4 and 5 with reel 2 empty, and the Book ended at 193.2x.

Over the whole log 37.4% of spins paid, wins had a median of 0.5x, and the barren stretches never went past 15 spins. The balance never fell further than €4,984.80, touched on spin 11. It reached €5,491.80 with the second Book and finished at €5,400.40, or 140% of what was staked, a figure the two Books carried.

Paying per spin for stacks, or once for a book

Five cards sit behind the BUY BONUS button. Three of them say ACTIVATE and charge for every spin they stay on; the two green BUY cards are single payments for a Book.

The cheapest card, BonusHunt FeatureSpins, charges 3x a spin to make the Books turn up five times as often. Double Stack, 25x a spin, guarantees two or more Stackways tiles and Triple Stack, at 75x, three or more, yet each tile still stacks only if the stack makes a win. The Super Book card costs 300x, two and a half times the 120x Book, for twice as many Special symbols.

We played on the 96.17% version, with card RTPs between 96.29% and 96.39%. The studio lists 94.17%, 92.28% and 88.26% for this game as well, so a casino copy may pay back less, and in markets that outlaw feature purchases the five cards are missing altogether.

Benny's stacks against the Mayan original

Hacksaw introduced Stackways as a new mechanic in Mayan Stackways, released in May 2023, five months before Benny. Benny kept that game's grid, its 1,024 to 100,000 ways, the 10,000x cap and the lack of a Wild, and in both a five of a kind of the top five symbols pays 2x to 4x. Most of the rest changed.

• Mayan has one Stackways tile that always shows its number; Benny splits it into Normal and Revealing.
• Mayan carries five card ranks, 10 to A, where Benny has four. Mayan's volatility is 4 and its demo RTP 96.23%; Benny's are 3 and 96.17%.
• Its bonuses are Stack Spins, where a Reel Activator guarantees a tile on its own reel, and Mayan Gold, a coin collect; Benny has the two Books.
• Its menu runs 3x, 40x, 110x and 200x; Benny's runs 3x, 25x, 75x, 120x and 300x.

Our two logs ended far apart, 140% here and 236.6% in the Mayan ruins, where a single round paid 921.2x.

Most base spins of Benny the Beer pay little, and the board comes alive only when a tile or a Special turns a reel into a tower. Our session leaned on its two natural Books, while the one we paid for returned less than half its price.