Christmas Big Bass Bonanza: demo, features & RTP
Christmas Big Bass Bonanza is where the festive series began, released by Pragmatic Play and Reel Kingdom on 2 December 2021. It returns 96.71% by default and pays up to 2,100× the stake, with Santa doing the collecting.
18+ · UKGC-licensed casinos only · £5 maximum stake per spin (£2 for ages 18–24) · T&Cs apply · BeGambleAware.org
Christmas Big Bass Bonanza demo
Play the official demo in pounds with virtual credit. It is the simplest game of the six, which makes it a good place to learn how the whole series works.
Free demo · 18+ only
Official Pragmatic Play demo · virtual credit in GBP · no real money
The 2021 original
Big Bass Bonanza is the game that started the franchise; this was its first Christmas edition, and every later festive game builds on it. The structure is pure and simple: a 5×3 grid, 10 fixed paylines, fish carrying cash values and a wild who scoops them up in free spins. No present boxes, no card picks, no pre-round draws.
The default RTP is 96.71%, which still ties for the best figure in the Christmas series. Lower versions at 95.67% and 94.62% are out there too, so check the info screen at your casino. Volatility is harder to pin down: one source calls it high (4 out of 5), another medium.
Free spins trigger about once in 113 spins on average.
- Provider
- Pragmatic Play
- Release
- 2 December 2021
- Grid
- 5×3 · 10 lines
- RTP
- 96.71%
- Volatility
- High / medium*
- Max win
- 2,100×
- Free spins
- 1 in 113 spins
- Fish values
- up to 2,000×
Symbols: Santa, money fish and scatter
The big difference from every later game: the wild is Santa — Father Christmas himself. He appears in free spins and collects the value of every money fish in view.
The fish carry cash prizes of up to 2,000× the bet. Their smallest value is not confirmed by the sources we use, so we leave it out rather than guess.
Free spins with Santa
Three, four or five scatters award 10, 15 or 20 free spins. From there the round follows the pattern the whole series later adopted: every fourth Santa collected adds 10 more spins and raises the multiplier on fish values. Later games kept this ×2/×3/×10 ladder, and Big Bass Xmas Xtreme extends it up to ×50.
- ×21st retrigger · 4 Santas · +10 spins
- ×32nd retrigger · 4 more Santas · +10 spins
- ×103rd retrigger · 4 more Santas · +10 spins, no further retriggers
There is one random feature. If a free spin ends with a single wild in view, money symbols may appear anywhere on the reels, giving Santa something to collect.
With a top prize of 2,100×, this is the most modest cap of the six. At the UK maximum stake of £5 that would be £10,500, reached on average about once in 3,880,481 spins.
Bonus Buy and Ante Bet
None of the sources we checked mention a Bonus Buy or an Ante Bet for Christmas Big Bass Bonanza, and we know of neither. In Great Britain a Bonus Buy would not be available anyway, so at UK casinos free spins come from scatters alone — as they do in the demo.
Prefer the classic? Play Christmas Big Bass Bonanza at a UKGC-licensed casino and set your limits before the first spin.
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