Deal With Death Demo: Free Play and Review

Classic Mode pays coloured suits on 14 lines

Classic Mode is a plain line game. The 14 fixed lines read from reel 1, and eight symbols pay: four grey card backs with a small suit, and four full-colour skeleton court cards. Grey clubs and diamonds are worth 0.1x for three and 2x for five, grey hearts and spades 0.2x to 3x. Among the coloured cards, the green club and the orange diamond range from 1x to 10x, while the blue heart runs 1.5x to 15x. Five magenta spades give 20x, the best line on the paytable.

That table has no separate wild. The JOKER can replace any paying symbol in Classic Mode, though never more than one lands on a spin, and its line wins are settled before the poker part starts. Without a Joker this half earned little in our log. The 479 spins that had neither a Joker nor a bonus returned €126.00 between them, and none paid more than 4x.

Four rows, four hands, and no pay for one pair

When the Joker lands, every paying symbol turns into a playing card. Each row is then read on its own as a five-card hand, and the game picks the best hand those five cards can make. Rows do not borrow from each other, and the rules add that the cards are generated at random, not drawn from a real deck.

The hand table pays per row: Two Pair 5x, Three of a Kind 10x, Straight 25x, Flush 50x, Full House 75x, Four of a Kind 100x, Straight Flush 500x and Royal Flush 2,000x the bet. One Pair is not on the list, so a row with a single pair pays nothing. All four rows may pay on one flip, and a single Joker spin can return several hands.

In that frame from our media session, three rows held two pairs each and paid 5x apiece, while the Joker's own row, an Ace, a 9, a 10 and a Jack around it, could reach no more than a pair. The remaining €0.20 is a line win paid before the flip.

Which Joker card turns up decides the extra

The Joker flips as well, into one of four cards. A Regular Joker becomes the best card for its row and does nothing else. A Hand Multiplier Joker does the same and also multiplies that row's hand by 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x or 10x for the spin; two of them on one row add their values. With a Global Multiplier Joker, every winning hand on the grid gets a 2x to 10x multiplier, and where another multiplier already applies, the two are summed.

Triple Trouble, the fourth, waits. It first becomes an ordinary card and the rows are paid as usual. After that all twenty cards are collected and shuffled, and the three best hands they can form are dealt back and paid one at a time, smallest first.

A Joker cannot help a row it is not on, and in that frame the paying hand sat one row above it. Triple Trouble came once in our log, on spin 53, and gave the session its best result. The rows first paid one Two Pair for €10.00. The re-deal then made a Straight and two Full Houses, worth €50.00, €150.00 and €150.00, so the spin returned €360.00, 180x the bet.

Ten spins in every bonus, and the scatters pick which ten

The scatter count on one Classic Mode spin picks the round, and every round opens with 10 spins. Three FS give Deal With It, the base game with a higher chance of a Joker. Dealbreaker needs four and brings a rising hand table: each winning hand raises its own price by its base value for the rest of the round, so a first Straight pays 25x, the next 50x and a third 75x. Five FS open the hidden bonus, Fool's Gold, which keeps Dealbreaker's table, guarantees a Joker on every spin and has no card in the buy menu.

Inside any of the three, a pair of extra FS is worth +2 spins and a set of three +4. A Joker on the trigger spin still counts, and its Poker Mode wins are paid before the round begins. Nor is an FS wasted when it shares a spin with a Joker, since the rules turn it into a random Joker card once the grid flips. Our bought Deal With It showed that on its seventh free spin.

Each Joker card became the missing card of its row, a 3 for 2-3-4-5-6 on top and a Queen for 10-J-Q-K-A below, and a third row held Two Pair. The spin paid €110.00. On free spin 4 a single Joker had already given a Straight and Three of a Kind for €70.00, and with three small line wins the round closed at TOTAL WIN €186.80, which is 93.4x the bet and a little under the €200.00 price.

19 Joker spins earned more than the rest of the log

Of our 500 paid spins, 26.8% returned something. The median win sat at 0.25x, and one stretch of 19 paid spins brought nothing back.

Jokers turned up on 19 of the 500 spins, about one in 26. Those spins returned €572.40, 63% of everything the session paid back, against €126.00 from the 479 plain spins and €211.20 from the two bonuses. Of the Joker spins, 5 dealt nothing better than a pair; 9 paid one Two Pair, 4 one Three of a Kind, and spin 349 a Straight for 25x.

Only two rounds had free spins, spins 221 and 299, and the tile counts exactly those. Both were Deal With It from three FS, and both ran 10 spins without an extra. In the first, a Hand Multiplier Joker worth x2 doubled a Straight to 50x on free spin 4, and the round came to 50.2x. The second dealt two ordinary Straights, on free spins 2 and 5, and finished on 55.4x.

The vertical jump near the start is spin 53, and nothing later came close. After it the demo balance wore down from €5,291.20 to €4,901.60, reached on spin 494, then finished on €4,909.60, 91% of the €1,000.00 staked.

Four cards, two billed per spin and two bought once

All four cards carry a Very high volatility label. BonusHunt FeatureSpins costs 3x per spin and lifts the bonus odds to five times the normal rate. Flippin' FeatureSpins charges 60x per spin, €120.00 each time at our stake, and puts a Joker and Poker Mode on every one. The two free spins rounds are single purchases: Deal With It at 100x and Dealbreaker at 200x.

At its 96.31% RTP a Flippin' spin returns about 57.8x over the long run, yet 18 of our 19 natural Joker spins paid 25x or less. The Two Pairs that came most often are nowhere near that average, which rests on rare hands and on multipliers such as the Triple Trouble of spin 53.

GAME INFO in this demo prints 96.25%, which is also the version it plays. Hacksaw's game page lists no RTP at all. In casino listings 94.30%, 92.25% and 86.22% appear as lower settings an operator can pick, and a few jurisdictions remove the buy cards altogether.

Suits on other grids here, and a frame shared with SixSixSix

Epic SixSixSix uses the same 5x4 grid and 14 paylines, but has no wild at all: its extras come from Wicked Wheels that open where a Blue or Red 6 lands. Here the Joker is the only wild, and most of its value comes after the line wins have been paid.

Card suits pay in Wicked Grin too, counted anywhere on a 5x5 grid from six of a kind. In this game a suit matters on a payline or, in Poker Mode, only towards a Flush, a Straight Flush or a Royal Flush; ranks do the rest of the work.

For long stretches Deal With Death plays as a modest line slot, and nearly all of its money arrives with the Joker. How much depends on which of the four Joker cards turns up. In our log 19 Joker spins brought in 63% of everything returned, and the one Triple Trouble paid more than the other 18 together.