Big Bass Bonanza
Big Bass Bonanza is definitely one of those slots that nobody really saw coming. Pragmatic Play dropped it in December 2020 with almost no fanfare, just a fisherman, a green tackle box, and a lake that looks like a Sunday afternoon in the countryside, and somehow it went on to become one of the most played slot games in the whole UK market. It spawned an entire family of sequels after that. But the original is still the one most players come back to, and there is a good reason for that.
The setup is smaller than you might expect from a game with this much noise around it. You get 5 reels, 3 rows, and only 10 fixed paylines, which is a fairly modest little grid by modern standards. The RTP sits at 96.71%, comfortably above the industry average of 96%, and the volatility is rated high, so the game can definitely go quiet on you for a stretch, sometimes a fairly long one, which is really something you want to know about before you sit down with it. The maximum win is 2,100x your total stake. Almost all of that potential lives inside one feature, and we will get to that in a bit.
Stakes run from £0.10 all the way up to £250 a spin, which is a really wide spread and covers casual players and high rollers without any fuss. What are you waiting for then? Register at Fortune Mobile Casino, cast your line, and see what comes up.
Theme, Design, and Audio
The theme is fishing, and the game does not try to be clever about it for even a second. You are sat at the edge of a lake with reeds poking up along the bank, a wooden jetty running off to one side, and hills fading into a soft blue haze in the distance. The light is that warm late-afternoon kind of light, the sort you get about an hour before the sun goes down. It is a calm looking game, honestly, which is a funny thing to say about a slot that can go 200 spins without paying anything, but that contrast is clearly deliberate, and the calmer the lake looks in the base game the more the free spins round feels like an actual event when it finally arrives.
There are no heavy borders around the grid and no clutter either, it just sits over the water, and the symbols are drawn in that friendly cartoon style Pragmatic Play uses across most of their catalogue. The fisherman himself is the star of the show, a cheerful bloke in a bucket hat and a green vest, and he only turns up when things are about to get interesting. The rest of the reel is filled with a red and white float, a fishing rod, a tackle box, a dragonfly, a blue bass, and the usual playing card symbols underneath them. Everything is big and clean and easy to read, which really helps on a phone screen.
Sound is the other half of the appeal, honestly. There is a light country style banjo loop playing in the background, all lazy and unhurried, and it fits the lake setting perfectly. Then the free spins kick in and the whole soundtrack changes gear, the tempo picks right up, and every time the fisherman scoops up a fish you get a satisfying little reel-in sound followed by a cash register noise. It is a small thing but it does a lot of work. You can explore more titles in the same style over at our online slots collection.
Symbols and Paytable
The symbols split into two groups based on what they are worth, high-paying and low-paying, which is the standard arrangement in most slot games. The high-paying ones are the themed icons, namely the float, the fishing rod, the tackle box, the dragonfly, and the blue bass. The low-paying ones are the classic card symbols, A, K, Q, J, and 10.
The float is the top payer in the base game and it is the only symbol that pays for just 2 on a line, which is a small detail a lot of players miss completely. A winning combination comprising 5 float symbols may possibly return 2,000 coins, while a combination of 4 floats will offer a lesser award of 200 coins only. The fishing rod comes next, then the tackle box and the dragonfly which pay the same as each other, and then the bass. To land a win you must get 3 or more matching symbols on consecutive reels, starting from the leftmost reel and running to the right.
Values in the table below are given in coins, based on the minimum 10 coin bet. Look out for the fisherman and the scatter, they are the two symbols that actually change what the game is doing.
| Symbols | 5x | 4x | 3x |
|---|---|---|---|
| Float | 2000 | 200 | 50 |
| Fishing Rod | 1000 | 150 | 30 |
| Tackle Box | 500 | 100 | 20 |
| Dragonfly | 500 | 100 | 20 |
| Bass | 200 | 50 | 10 |
| A, K, Q, J, 10 | 100 | 25 | 5 |
Gameplay and Special Features
The base game is about as plain as a modern slot gets, and that is not a criticism. You pick your stake, you hit spin, and you try to line up matching symbols across the 10 fixed paylines. There is no cascade mechanic, no expanding grid, no wheel of any kind. The base game is honestly a bit sleepy and most sessions will feel fairly flat until the scatters land, which is exactly how the game is built. Everything interesting has been packed into the free spins instead.
There are two special elements to know about here, the Fisherman Wild and the free spins round, and they are tied together so tightly that it is easier to just think of them as a single feature. If you want a bit of background on how these rounds work across slots in general, the ultimate guide to free spins bonuses is worth a quick read first.
Fisherman Wild
The fisherman is the wild symbol, and he substitutes for every symbol on the reels except the scatter, increasing the chances of the players landing more winning combinations. In the base game that is the whole of his job, he fills a gap, he completes a line, and he wanders off again. Nothing dramatic.
In the free spins round he becomes a completely different animal. This is the part worth understanding properly, because the game hides all of its money in there.
Free Spins and the Money Fish
Landing 3 or more of the scatter symbols anywhere on the grid triggers the free spins round. The tiers work like this:
- 3 scatter symbols = 10 free spins
- 4 scatter symbols = 15 free spins
- 5 scatter symbols = 20 free spins
Once the round starts, money fish symbols begin appearing on the reels, and each one carries a cash value printed right on it. These values range from 2x your stake at the small end up to a possible 2,000x at the very top, though the larger fish are rare and you should not go in expecting them, most of what lands will be sitting down in the low numbers and that is completely normal for the game. Here is the important bit. The money fish do not pay by themselves. They just sit there. You only receive their value when a fisherman wild lands on the same spin, and when he does, he collects every single money fish on screen at once and pays the lot into your balance.
So a spin with four fat fish on it and no fisherman gives you nothing at all. And a spin with one fisherman and six fish can be the best moment of your entire session. That is the whole tension of the round, and it is why this game got as popular as it did.
It gets better as the round goes on. Every fourth fisherman you collect retriggers the feature and hands you 10 more free spins, and it also bumps up a multiplier that applies to all the fish values from then on. The first retrigger takes the multiplier to 2x, the second one takes it to 3x, and the third takes it all the way to 10x. That third retrigger is the one everybody is chasing, and the 2,100x maximum win comes almost entirely out of it. It does not happen often. But when it does land, the wait feels completely worth it.
There is no feature buy option here, so the free spins have to be triggered naturally.
RTP and Volatility
RTP refers to the portion of the total wagered amount that a game returns to players over a very long run of play. Big Bass Bonanza offers an RTP of 96.71%, which is a fair bit above the industry standard of 96% and is one of the reasons the game holds up so well next to newer releases. It is essential to note that this is a theoretical value, calculated across millions of spins, hence the return is not guaranteed in any single session. Your own results may look nothing like it. If you want the longer version, have a look at what return to player actually means before you set your stake.
The volatility is high, rated 4 out of 5 by the provider themselves. In plain terms that means the wins arrive less often but they arrive bigger, and the gaps in between them can test your patience quite hard. Base game spins will often return small amounts or nothing at all, and the balance drifts down slowly while you wait for scatters, which is simply the trade you are agreeing to when you pick up a game built like this one. Players who want steady, frequent little wins may find this one frustrating. Players who are happy to sit through the quiet stretches for a shot at something larger are the ones this game was built for. Either way, set a budget before you start and stick to it, real gambling carries real risk, and at Fortune Mobile Casino we take responsible play seriously and offer a full set of tools to help you stay in control.
How To Play Big Bass Bonanza
Nothing about the interface is complicated, and there is very little to learn here, which suits the game. All the controls sit in a thin panel along the bottom of the screen, well out of the way of the reels. To view the paytable, the symbol values, and the rules of the free spins round, click the i icon in the bottom left corner.
Beside it sits the burger icon, which opens the settings, and from there you can turn the music and the sound effects on or off, and switch the quick spin mode on as well. The large round spin button sits over on the right of the panel. The stake is adjusted using the + and – buttons next to it, and the range runs from £0.10 up to £250 per spin, with the balance, the current bet, and your last win all displayed across the bottom bar so you always know where you stand.
Are you tired of hitting the spin button over and over again? Don’t worry, the autoplay tool lets you set a number of spins, up to 100 of them, and then just sit back and let the reels run on their own. You can also set your own loss limits inside the autoplay menu, which is genuinely worth doing on a game with volatility this high.
That’s it. Isn’t that really simple?
Start Your Journey at Fortune Mobile Casino With Big Bass Bonanza
To play Big Bass Bonanza at Fortune Mobile Casino you must first register with us. It only takes a couple of minutes:
- Start by clicking the register/sign-in button found on the homepage.
- Fill in the details requested, such as your name, address, and area of residence.
- Fortune Mobile Casino offers many payment services for your convenience. Choose one and then make your deposit.
- Once done, verify the processing of your deposit from the message sent by your bank.
- That’s it! Search for your favourite game and start playing right away!
You can also browse our new games and popular games sections to find more titles worth your time.
Big Bass Bonanza Is Available On Mobile
Do you prefer to play on your phone? Well then, you are in luck. Big Bass Bonanza is fully optimised for mobile, and it is one of those rare games that arguably plays better on a small screen than it does on a desktop. The symbols are big, the grid is only 5 reels wide, and there is no clutter anywhere, so nothing gets lost, not the cash values printed across the money fish and not the small numbers running along the bottom bar either. You can play it on the train, on a break at work, or on the sofa, all you have to do is open the Fortune Mobile Casino site in your mobile browser and launch it. The touch controls are responsive and the loading times are short, even on an older handset.
More Games by Pragmatic Play
Pragmatic Play is one of the largest slot studios operating in the regulated UK market, with a catalogue running to hundreds of titles and a release schedule that never seems to slow down. They have a real talent for taking a simple idea and building a single memorable mechanic around it, which is exactly what happened here with the fisherman and his fish, and that one idea has since been borrowed and reworked by half the industry, which tells you something about how well it landed. Their games are available at pretty much every licensed UK casino, and a fair few of them have become genuine classics.
If you enjoyed this one, some of their other popular titles are Wolf Gold, Gates of Olympus, Sweet Bonanza, The Dog House, Sugar Rush, and Starlight Princess. The Big Bass series itself also grew into a long line of sequels, so there is plenty more fishing to be done.
Discover More Than Online Slots at Fortune Mobile Casino
It is not only slots that you can play at Fortune Mobile Casino, there is quite a lot more to explore. We have a big collection of casino games such as Baccarat, Roulette, Blackjack, Poker, Slingo and more, along with a live dealer section for players who want something closer to the real thing. Most of our games come from world-class providers and all of them are playable on mobile, so you can access them anywhere, at any time you want. New to some of the terminology? Our casino glossary explains the common terms in plain English. Don’t forget to check the latest promotions before your first spin.
