Powered by SlotsReach.com
Hacksaw Gaming has been pumping out games like crazy lately, they dropped 22 games in the three months before this one!, and their latest October release is Coffee Dealer. If you love that 1930s Cuphead-style rubber-hose animation, you’re going to love how this looks. The main characters, a bean with a baseball bat and a grinning mug named Dean, are running a back-alley coffee racket. The artwork is incredibly polished.
But man, the math running this game is brutal.
A Desert of a Base Game
Let’s talk payouts, because the standard paytable is severely restricted. If you land a five-of-a-kind line of royals, you literally just get your bet back (1x). Five money bundles pay 6x, and the absolute best standard line, five coffee cups, pays 20x. That’s it.
Yet, the game boasts a 10,000x max win. So how do you bridge that massive gap? It all comes down to one single mechanic: the Wild Coffee Reel.
Here’s how it works: If a cup wild lands and can complete a win, it expands to fill the whole reel. If it doesn’t make a win, it just sits there as a single wild and does nothing. When it does expand, up to nine extra cups drop onto it, building a multiplier up to 10x. That multiplier applies to any win the reel touches.
Playing the base game feels like wandering through a desert. In my test session, I got a hit rate of about 23%, but my actual return was a miserable 8%. It was just an endless sea of dead spins, sprinkled with the occasional win that paid back half my bet.
The Game Constantly Blocks Itself
The most frustrating part of Coffee Dealer is that the mechanics actively fight against each other.
First, if you get lucky enough to land multiple wild reels in the same win, only multipliers above 1x are added together. A bare 1x wild reel doesn’t help your multiplier pot at all.
Second, and this is the real killer, a scatter symbol and a cup wild cannot land on the same reel in the same spin. Because of this, the slot is constantly cannibalizing its own layout. If the board is setting up a wild reel, you have one less column available for a scatter. If a scatter drops, you have one less column for cups. You’ll frequently see a lone scatter just sitting in the corner while the rest of the grid does nothing.
The Free Spins (If You Can Get Them)
Scatters don’t pay any cash, but they are your ticket to the three tiers of free spins:
- 3 Scatters (Mug Life): 10 free spins with a better chance of landing cups.
- 4 Scatters (Brewfather): 8 free spins. If a cup expands, that reel stays “active” and guarantees a cup on that column for the rest of the bonus.
- 5 Scatters (Espresso Empire): 10 spins with at least two cups guaranteed on every single spin.
Here’s the catch: You cannot buy the 5-scatter Espresso Empire bonus at any price. You have to trigger it naturally in the base game. You can retrigger inside the bonuses (two scatters get you +2 spins, three gets you +4), but because of that annoying rule where scatters and cups can’t share a reel, retriggers are incredibly rare.
Bonus Buys: Paying for a Delayed Reaction
If you like to skip the base game, the buy menu gives you a few options. (A quick warning: always check your casino’s RTP first. The default is 96.3%, but casinos can lower this game all the way down to a nasty 86.3%).
I tested the bonus buys, and they were a rough ride.
I bought Mug Life for 80x, and it fell well short of its price. The reality of this bonus is that it is a one-spin wonder. I had a spin where two wild reels connected, and only one of them carried a multiplier worth counting, because the bare one adds nothing to the pot. That single spin was very nearly the entire round. Everything after it added nothing at all, and the counter simply stopped moving while I still had a good half of my spins left to play. You can know the round is dead long before it ends.
But Brewfather (200x) was a massive rip-off. You are paying a premium 200x price for sticky activated reels. But remember the rule: a reel only activates if a cup expands, and a cup only expands if it’s part of a win! You are paying top dollar for a mechanic that requires the rarest base game event to happen first.
In my round the first column did not switch on until the end was already in sight, and the second one arrived so late it had nothing left to do. The game is built to allow exactly that, charging you 200x for a feature that can run out of road before it has started working.
The Verdict
When you look at similar recent 5×5 expanding-wild games, like Hacksaw’s own Unleashed Chaos (which has a 30,000x max win) or ELK’s Bamboo Pandits, which landed earlier the same month on the same board with the same 10,000x cap, Coffee Dealer feels a bit tight.
Don’t get me wrong, the artwork totally carries the experience. The subway platform, the train pulling in, the police chase on the win screen, it’s all top-tier stuff. But underneath that beautiful paint job is a stingy paytable and a bonus trigger that actively competes with the wild mechanics for space on the board.
If you’re going to play it, the 80x Mug Life buy is probably your most honest bet, it gives you exactly the highly volatile, single-spin gamble it promises. But I would stay far away from that 200x Brewfather buy, unless you enjoy paying for a delayed reaction that never actually arrives.
