Bigger Bass Bonanza

How Bigger Bass Bonanza Plays

Bigger Bass Bonanza is the first sequel in Pragmatic Play's Big Bass series, released in September 2021. It expanded the original Big Bass Bonanza from a 5x3 grid to a 5x4 layout with 12 fixed paylines, up from 10. The RTP sits at 96.71% with high volatility, a bet range of 0.10 to 250 per spin, and a maximum payout of 4,000x your stake - nearly double the original's 2,100x cap.

The base game runs as a standard payline slot. Symbols land, wins pay left to right across the 12 lines, and the reels spin again. There are no cascades, no cluster pays, and no Megaways mechanics here. Low-value symbols are card values (10 through Ace), while the premium symbols are fishing-themed: tackle boxes, dragonflies, and bass fish in ascending value. The highest-paying regular symbol is the large bass, worth 20x your stake for five across a payline.

What makes the game tick is how little happens in the base game compared to the bonus round. The fisherman wild and the money fish symbols are restricted to free spins only. Base game sessions tend to be dry stretches broken by small payline wins, which is typical for a high-volatility slot where most of the return is loaded into the bonus feature.

Free Spins and the Money Collect Mechanic

Three, four, or five scatter symbols (the bass logo) landing anywhere on the reels trigger 10, 15, or 20 free spins respectively. This is where the game opens up completely. During free spins, two new symbol types appear that are absent from the base game: money fish and the fisherman wild.

Money fish symbols carry random cash values, ranging from small amounts up to 2,000x your bet. On their own, they do nothing - they just sit on the reels displaying their value. The fisherman wild is the collection trigger. When a fisherman lands on any reel, he collects the value of every money fish visible on the grid at that moment. All those cash amounts are added together and paid out in a single sum.

This creates a specific rhythm to the bonus. You want money fish to stack up across the reels without a fisherman appearing too early. A fisherman landing with one small money fish on the grid pays very little. A fisherman landing when six or seven money fish are showing, some of them carrying high values, can produce a significant payout in a single collection.

Multiplier Progression

The retrigger system is where Bigger Bass Bonanza separates itself from the original. Every fourth fisherman wild collected during the bonus round awards 10 additional free spins and increases the multiplier applied to all future collections.

The progression works as follows: after the first retrigger, collected values are multiplied by 2x. The second retrigger bumps it to 3x. The third and final retrigger pushes the multiplier to 10x. That 10x multiplier applied to a grid full of high-value money fish is how the game reaches its 4,000x maximum win.

Reaching the 10x stage requires 16 fisherman wilds to land across the entire bonus round, which is uncommon. Most bonus rounds end after the initial free spins or one retrigger at best. When the multiplier does build, though, even medium-sized money fish values start producing outsized returns. A 50x money fish collected at 10x pays 500x on its own.

RTP and Volatility

The 96.71% RTP is above the industry average and matches the original Big Bass Bonanza exactly. High volatility means long gaps between meaningful wins, with the bulk of the game's return concentrated in the free spins feature. The 12.53% hit frequency tells you that roughly one in eight spins produces any kind of base game win, which is low even by high-volatility standards.

Session character is defined by the wait for scatters. Base game spins are functional but uneventful. The excitement is front-loaded into the bonus trigger and then into whether the fisherman wilds appear at the right moments to collect stacked money values. A single well-timed fisherman during an advanced multiplier stage can turn an entire session around.

Comparison to the Original Big Bass Bonanza

The core mechanic is identical: fish carry values, the fisherman collects them. What changed is the scale. The extra row adds two more paylines, the maximum win nearly doubles from 2,100x to 4,000x, and the grid feels more spacious with four rows of symbols instead of three. More reel positions mean more potential money fish visible at collection time, which is where the higher max win comes from.

The retrigger multiplier system is unchanged, and the sound design and visual style stay close to the original's fishing-dock aesthetic. If you played the original, this is the same game on a bigger grid with higher ceilings. The series has since expanded to over 35 titles, including Big Bass Splash, Big Bass Bonanza 1000 with its 20,000x maximum, and themed variants like Big Bass Football Bonanza. Bigger Bass Bonanza sits as the bridge between the original and the more elaborate entries that followed.