When it comes to thinking up titles of slot games, you’ve got to hand it to the editorial team over at Light & Wonder for coming up with this doozy: Carnival Cow Coin Combo.
I mean, I don’t want to say there were psychedelics involved, but I don’t not want to say it either.
Also: You can rearrange the words in any order of the title and it doesn’t matter one bit. Combo Cow Coin Carnival? Sure. Coin Combo Cow Carnival? Why not. Cow Combo Coin Carnival? Absolutely.
At any rate, that’s the game NJ casino app players have fallen in love with, as it ranks as a top-played slot across the board. This week, we head to Ocean online casino to give Carnival Combo Coin Cow … no, wait, I mean Coin Carnival Cow Combo … that’s not right. Gimme a sec.
Carnival Cow Coin Combo. That’s it. That’s what we’re going to be giving a whirl.
Moo.
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The facts
All right, there’s a lot going on here.
The game is a follow-up to Marvelous Mouse Coins Combo, which was only half as alliterative as Carnival Cow Coin Combo. So there’s that.
Also, the RTP is 96%, the minimum bet is 22 cents, and there are numerous ways to win, including the ol’ standby: Get three symbols in a row from left to right, win some money. A golden bowl-looking thing pays the most, the number 8 pays the least. There are wild symbols which extend to the size of the row — it’s a 5×3 slot — and they come in the shape of a tree.
But that’s just the appetizer.
Things start getting interesting when you land on an “element coin,” which will reveal itself to be either red, blue, or green. And then those “coins” are deposited into ancient Chinese-looking bowls (which if I had a real one, I’d definitely seek out the Antiques Roadshow crew). These bowls then can get filled up and lightly explode, thereby triggering a bonus round.
Important note: There is no rhyme or reason to the exploding bowls. In my gameplay, one coin could trigger the bonus, or sometimes it can , take … well, seemingly a million. The bowls get fatter and fatter with coins, but don’t pop. Obviously slot machines are random, but this appearance of control — fill up the bowls, they get fatter — yields to mild annoyance that they’re not exploding. Of course, this is tempered when one coin explodes things, but it’s worth noting before you play.
As for the bonus rounds, the first one is the cow feature, where one bowl pops. Then a cow starts spitting out cow coins, each with a cash reward on it. Red spits out six to start, blue generates eight to start, and green provides 10 to start. Then the reels spin, and you hope to land another coin. You get three chances to do this. If a coin lands, you win all the money on the coins and get to spin again. Get another coin, get all the money. And so on.
If two or more bowls pop open, you can trigger the jackpot feature, where you flip over hidden symbols. The first three you match, that’s the prize you win.
You can also randomly, at any time, be gifted a red envelope, which awards 38.88x your bet, which is nice.
You can also buy your way into the base bonus game at 27x, 46x, or 83x your wager (depending if you choose the red, blue, or green bonus).
Look and feel
I suppose what the developers are going for is that ancient Chinese vibe, and it more or less delivers. The graphics give off that vibe, and the music sounds like the “smooth jazz” version of what I imagine ancient Chinese music sounds like.
Additionally, there’s a Pavlovian “ding!” every time you spin, which I’m sure could be the basis of 1,000-page thesis papers for Ph.D candidates in psychology.
It’s also pretty cool when the bowls pop and explode. It takes a second or two for it to happen — a lifetime in online slot play — and so when it does … yay!
The bonus rounds are surprisingly light on bells and whistles: They happen, you collect, the end.
The results
I played more of this than I expected. I won a little bit, especially after I hit a jackpot feature. And wins came at a decent pace, probably once every four or five spins on average.
It’s honestly one of the more fun slot games I’ve ever played. The graphics are easy on the eye, the music is calming, and the thrill that comes whenever a coin lands on the screen — which is seemingly about half of the time — is real. Any one coin can trigger the bonus, and when the coin travels up to the bowl, the anticipation is legitimate.
Overall, I give this game four cows. Four coins? Four carnivals? It’s a combo, that much I know.
