Celebrate Chinese New Year anytime with Play’n GO’s cute and cheerful slot! In our Chinese New Year review, we’ll take you through the bonus features, cash prizes, RTP, and other details you need to know before you play. You can win up to 5,000x your stake in this 5x3 slot, trigger a Free Spins round, and use the optional Gamble feature to potentially quadruple your prizes.
Chinese New Year features 5 reels, 3 rows, and 1 - 15 paylines. Bets range from £0.15 to £18.75, depending on the number of paylines in play.
Land enough matching symbols on any active payline to build a winning combination. The high and medium symbols award prizes for two or more. Low symbols, though, pay out for three or more instead.
Chinese New Year has a 96.65% RTP, which is well above the 96% average for slot games. The volatility is in the medium range: while it can pay out less frequently than low-volatility slots on average, there’s still a solid top prize of 5,000x your stake available. Land five Wild symbols on a payline to win that.
To help you find the best online casinos for playing Chinese New Year, here’s a list of the top UK slot sites on the UK market.
Chinese New Year has a fun design, featuring the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac. Each creature is illustrated in a cute and cartoony style, from the adorable horse to the dragon with its smouldering gaze.
The game’s background scene depicts a street lined with traditional Chinese buildings. The reels are contained in a gateway with a green tiled roof and a realistic dragon statue on both sides. The Chinese-inspired music is calm and soothing for the most part, and a little triumphant tune is triggered each time you line up winning symbols.
Chinese New Year includes 12 symbols, one for each animal of the Chinese zodiac: pig, dog, rooster, goat, horse, snake, rabbit, ox, rat, monkey, dragon, and tiger. The Tiger symbol pays the top prize: land 5 on a payline to win 5,000x your stake.
The Tiger is also the Wild symbol. It substitutes for all symbols except the Bonus Scatter, Free Spin, and Scatter symbols to help form winning lines. The Dragon is the Bonus Scatter symbol, and the Monkey is the Free Spin symbol.
Pig
3 — 5x bet / 4 — 20x bet / 5 — 100x bet
Dog
3 — 5x bet / 4 — 20x bet / 5 — 100x bet
Rooster
3 — 5x bet / 4 — 20x bet / 5 — 100x bet
Goat
3 — 5x bet / 4 — 30x bet / 5 — 150x bet
Horse
3 — 5x bet / 4 — 30x bet / 5 — 150x bet
Snake
2 — 2x bet / 3 — 20x bet / 4 — 100x bet / 5 — 500x bet
Rabbit
2 — 2x bet / 3 — 20x bet / 4 — 100x bet / 5 — 500x bet
Ox
2 — 3x bet / 3 — 30x bet / 4 — 150x bet / 5 — 750x bet
Rat
2 — 5x bet / 3 — 50x bet / 4 — 200x bet / 5 — 1,000x bet
As Chinese New Year is a HTML5 slot, you can play it on most mobile devices. The game has the same fun visuals, and works in portrait and landscape mode.
Whichever way you prefer to play, Chinese New Year will adjust to your device to provide you with a convenient user experience. The game’s layout looks a little bit different in portrait mode as less of the background is visible. However, landscape mode offers a wider view and is identical to the desktop version.
In Chinese New Year, you can trigger three different bonus features that can help you pick up more prizes.
Land Dragon Bonus Scatters on reel 3, 4, and 5 to trigger the Bous game. Launch fireworks to win prizes: each firework that you shoot successfully awards a payout, but any that explode on the ground will end the feature.
Get Monkey Free Spin symbols on reel 1, 3, and 5 to trigger the Free Spins feature. The monkey will start a bonus wheel: this will spin then stop, choosing one of the animal symbols at random. This symbol will become an Extra Scatter.
The monkey will then strike a gong to award a specific number of free spins. The Extra Scatter can land on any free spin and pay according to the paytable. You can’t retrigger the Free Spins round, sadly.
The Gamble feature is available after each winning spin in the base game. If you choose to play it, you can double or quadruple your win by correctly guessing the colour or suit of a face-down playing card, respectively. If you get the colour or suit wrong, though, you’ll forfeit the triggering win.
There are plenty of Asian-themed slots on the market, and Chinese New Year is a great addition to the set. You can win a generous top prize of 5,000x your bet, and the RTP is above average at 96.65%. Some players might find the max bet of £18.75 a bit lower than they would like, though, and most payouts tended to be tiny when I tested the game. Bigger payouts may be sporadic at best.
The Free Spins feature incorporates an Extra Scatter symbol to help you land more winning combinations, and the festive Bonus game lets you launch fireworks for the chance of an extra payout. You can also use the Gamble feature to potentially double or quadruple your wins in the base game.
Overall, it’s an entertaining slot with Play’n GO’s usual polish and smooth performance.
Rating: 8.0
Here are five frequently asked questions about Chinese New Year: