A Christmas Slots Tale

The Tale of Christmas Slots
Christmas slots is the topic here even though it’s All Saints Eve today as I type this, or Halloween as we generally know it, there’s a succinct difference in slot games for these two occasions. The Halloween games tend to generally be designed specifically for the Halloween event, for example Netent’s Halloween Jack although we do get clones on occasion such as Iron Dog’s Halloween Horrors Megaways slot, a re-skin of Pirate Kingdom Megaways. The opposite tends to be true for Christmas-themed slot games which are nearly always lazy clones of popular older game editions.
It’ll be clonely this Christmas…
So there are games that thankfully haven’t been turned into seasonal copies as with Startburst or classics like Immortal Romance and Thunderstruck 2 and thank the lord games like Raging Rhino haven’t had the incongruous meeting of African veldt and arctic snow – yet! We can start years back when Nextgen turned Foxin’ Wins into Foxin Wins Christmas Edition although to be fair there were a few changes made to the mechanic. Even Big Time Gaming fired one out last year with Christmas Bonanza and now they’ve caught the bug as we’ve just had a peek at Christmas Catch, a clone of their older Golden Catch.
Why so many?
I suppose it’s cheap to simply re-skin an existing slot with new graphics with a great excuse of impending Xmas to justify the games, maybe the developers wind down for Christmas a few months before the rest of us? We’ve had some brilliant slots in the past that were actually specifically designed new for the season, my favourites being Microgaming’s old and volatile Deck the Halls and Play’n Go’s Xmas Magic.
So now let’s just list a few of the cheap snowy copies – Netent: Aloha Christmas and Fruit Shop Christmas, BTG we covered their two above. Quickspin: Big Bad Wolf Christmas, Play’n Go: Moon Princess Christmas Kingdom with Pragmatic the serial offenders: Big Bass Christmas Bash (Big Bass Splash), Christmas Carol Megaways (Great Rhino MW), Starlight Christmas (Starlight Princess) and Sweet Bonanza Xmas (Sweet Bonanza).
The Disappointment of Christmas Slots
So as far as Christmas slots go, at least they reflect real life. We look forward to the season only to give and receive cheap tat to be discreetly ignored from the day after, hidden away at the back of a cupboard and quickly forgotten or binned and disposed of. The gift that never even started giving…