Minted Mike Demo: Free Play and Review

Up to 20 Wilds, sprayed before the lines pay

All three Stickers also substitute for every paying symbol, so one that does nothing else can still finish a line. A spin carries at most one Sticker of each colour. Each then has a chance of switching on its mechanic, and GAME INFO is clear that the animation around a Sticker says nothing about that chance. In our 500 spins a Blue Sticker showed on 90 of them and sprayed on 12.

No Wild reaches the grid except through the Blue Spray Can. It adds 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 15 or 20 of them before the wins are counted, so it is the one Sticker that changes the grid before it pays. Our 12 base-game sprays added 3 to 6 Wilds and paid €263.40 between them, a third of everything the log returned. Spin 70 got six and paid €155.20, 77.6x. On spin 75 three Wilds found no line at all. The biggest figure in the paytable is 50x, for five Wilds on a payline.

Hot Lines painted on after the win

The Pink Marker works the other way round. It can only activate after the spin's wins are paid, then paints 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 12, 15, 20 or all 26 of the paylines as Hot Lines and respins the grid, with no Stickers allowed on the respin. All Hot Lines share one multiplier, shown in the pink bar, anywhere between 2x and 183x, and it applies to any win along a Hot Line. When all three activate on one spin, the Pink Marker acts first and the Roll last, with the Spray Can between them.

Pink Stickers turned up on 63 of our spins and activated 8 times. Their multipliers ranged from 2x to 10x on two to six lines, and in only 3 of the eight respins did a win cross a Hot Line. Together those respins paid €17.00, the best €6.80 on spin 409 with two lines hit at x8. On the studio page 183x is the top of that bar, a separate number from the game's 5,000x cap.

FS Stickers count the spins, Upgrades pick the level

There are no scatters to collect in Minted Mike. A Green Sticker that activates fires the Green Sticker Roll after the wins, and FS Stickers, sometimes with one or two yellow FS Upgrade Stickers, land on top of the symbols. How many land is how long the bonus runs, one free spin per Sticker of either kind.

Steezy Skater needs at least eight plain FS Stickers and plays like the base game, only with Stickers of all three colours landing more often. Ink the City, which needs seven FS and one Upgrade, makes the Hot Lines progressive: they stay where they are for the whole bonus, each later Pink activation adds 1 to 24 lines, and the shared multiplier increases every time, drawn from the same 2x to 183x list. Tag and Dash takes six FS and two Upgrades, keeps the Ink the City rules and guarantees a Sticker on every spin.

A Green Sticker Roll inside a bonus adds another 8 to 20 spins, and an Upgrade among them moves the round up a level, carrying the spins left, and in Ink the City the Hot Lines and multiplier, into the new bonus. Hacksaw's own page gives Tag and Dash a flat 20 spins; GAME INFO says 8 to 20, and we follow GAME INFO.

Our bought Steezy Skater came out at the low end. Its roll gave 10 spins, and although Stickers landed on several of them, none activated. €9.40 was all it paid, under a tenth of the €100.00 price.

Five Steezy Skaters, and a balance that ended on its lowest point

Close to half the spins returned something, 46.4% of 500 at €2.00, but the median win was only 0.5x, and no losing run went past 7 spins. Most of those wins were small line pays that fell short of the stake.

Only 5 Green Sticker Rolls fired out of 128 spins with a Green Sticker on the grid, and the five Steezy Skaters had 9, 10, 10, 11 and 14 spins, worth €173.60 in all. Spins 241 and 242 triggered one after the other. Inside the bonuses the Blue Spray Can activated three times, each time on its round's best spin; in the spin 367 round it put seven Wilds on free spin 10 for €79.20 of the round's €90.00. No Upgrade Sticker came, so we never saw Ink the City or Tag and Dash.

As early as spin 70 the balance had reached its high mark, €5,090.00, and spin 500 left it at €4,796.80, the lowest of the session. In all 79.7% came back, and the 475 spins on which no Sticker activated contributed €336.20 of it.

Two cards that charge per spin, two that charge once

BonusHunt FeatureSpins, the cheapest card at 3x a spin, raises the bonus chance of each spin fivefold. Spray the System FeatureSpins, 60x a spin, puts a Pink and a Blue Sticker on each spin and guarantees that one of the two mechanics activates, but it keeps FS Stickers off the grid. Steezy Skater and Ink the City are one-off purchases, and neither card names a spin count: in our bought round the Green Sticker Roll settled it after the payment.

Tag and Dash is missing from the menu and can only come through FS Upgrade Stickers: two in one roll, or one more inside Ink the City. Those returns come from the demo's 96.31% build. Three lower versions exist as well, 94.29%, 92.27% and 86.36%, and a casino is free to put any of them live; certain jurisdictions take the buy button out entirely.

Where Vending Machine and Wishbringer do something similar

Multipliers switched on by a special symbol are the core of Vending Machine as well, where a Lightning Bolt lights the tab of a whole row and its multiplier applies to any win crossing that row, a row of the grid and not a payline.

A bonus whose length depends on what lands is how Wishbringer sizes Arabian Nights: 3 to 6 FS scatters give 5 to 40 spins. Minted Mike reads the same idea off the number of FS Stickers instead, one spin for each.

Stickers spend long stretches on the grid doing nothing, and in our log the Blue Spray Can was the main way the game paid that time back. Hot Lines added little in the base game and all five bonuses stayed at the first level, so the most interesting part, progressive Hot Lines in Ink the City, remained behind the €400.00 card.