In China, the New Year celebrations are the biggest annual event and traditionally, the character of Gong Xi Fa Cai brings wishes of health, wealth and good fortune at this important time. You don’t have to know much about Asian customs to enjoy the Gong Xi Fa Cai slot machine from IGT though, as this game can bring you prosperity just by landing the right symbols across it.
This is a 5-reel, 50-payline slot that can be played at the top online casino sites. By offering a slot game with such a popular theme and some great design features, IGT have managed to attract a huge audience to these cartoon-style reels.
But without some equally impressive gameplay and bonus rounds, those players wouldn’t stick around for long, so the company has made sure that you can spin up some huge wins and trigger potentially lucrative extra features.
Those features include symbol replacements on every spin, free spins with higher-value symbols on the reels, plus the option to multiply payouts by up to 5x over with a special bet. Jackpot payouts can be won on any spin, with instant prizes of 10,000.00 or more, so let the celebrations begin as we join the party with Gong Xi Fa Cai.
The brightly-colored reels of this game can be spun for just 0.50, but there’s an optional feature bet that raises the minimum stakes to 0.75. Maximum stakes also rise from 500.00 to 750.00 with this bet in place, but there are special win multipliers to claim from it. You play with 50 or 75 coins and wins are shown as the number of coins collected as matching symbols stop across paylines from left to right.
Land the perfect combination of symbols with the highest multiplier and you’ll walk away with 3,750x your line stake, or 56,250.00 at the maximum bet.
A huge pile of gold coins covers the control buttons, perhaps remaining you that coins could soon be coming your way. Easy to use Plus and Minus arrow buttons change your stakes to suit your bankroll, while other options include Auto-spinning the reels for up to 50 times and setting the volume of the Chinese-style soundtrack.
It’s nice to see that such a popular slot has been made available across online and mobile casino platforms, as IGT sometimes save their games for land-based casinos only. It’s a medium to high volatility game, so don’t worry if you haven’t landed a winning combination after a few spins, as the eventual rewards could be of a fairly high value.
Like all IGT games, the Gong Xi Fa Cai slot machine is fully licensed, certified for fair play and has a high return to players percentage which in this case averages out at up to 96.23%.
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Along with the shiny gold coins, richly decorated reels and traditional Chinese lanterns are seen. Gong Xi Fa Cai, which translates as ‘Congratulations and be prosperous’, is shown as an animated character who stands beside the reels, holding a lucky golden bowl and smiling at you as winning spins occur.
It looks great, although IGT have perhaps taken a safe route by using playing card symbols as the lower-paying icons, rather than filling the reels with Chinese-themed images. Ceremonial lions, fish, a phoenix and a dragon are the higher-value symbols, with the dragon paying out 550 coins when it fills a payline.
These are all beautifully designed and there are little animations that play out when they become part of a winning combination. The wild symbol acts as others and is worth up to 600 coins. A Dynamic Symbol Replacement feature sees random symbols transformed into any high-value icon at the start of each spin, making it easier to claim bigger wins.
If you have the bonus bet active, reel 1 on the left side will have multiplier values of 2x, 3x, or 5x attached to each symbol and your wins are boosted by the amount shown. A Chinese letter is a scatter symbol that launches 8 free spins when you see it in any 3 or more places, and IGT have sprinkled these spins with a little New Year good fortune, taking out the playing card symbols and having just the high-value ones on the reels.
You can retrigger this round over and over if you’re really lucky. The Gong Xi Fa Cai slot game also has four jackpots that can be won on any spin where a multiplier appeared on reel 1. You have to pick from lucky red envelopes, revealing colorful gems.
Keep on clicking envelopes until 3 gems of a kind have been found, and you win the corresponding Mini, Minor, Major or Maxi jackpots and while these are not progressive prizes, they are still very nice indeed!
Slots with a traditional Chinese theme are always going to be a big attraction and when you add in the nice design features and bonuses of the Gong Xi Fa Cai slot game, it’s no wonder it has become such a big hitter for IGT. Head over to the one of the top online casinos to see if this New Year themed game brings you good fortune.
Among the hundreds of other Asian themed slots available, you could enjoy a few spins of Chinese New Year, from Openbet. As well as the obvious connection to the topic, it’s got several jackpots to collect and cartoon symbols based on the animals of the Chinese zodiac, plus there’s the chance to win 10,000x your line bet in any spin.