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An Honest Review of BGaming’s 3 Lucky Monkeys Hold & Win
Let’s talk about BGaming’s 3 Lucky Monkeys Hold & Win. It’s a pretty solid medium-volatility slot, but it has some weird quirks you definitely need to know about before you spin – especially if you like buying bonuses.
The Base Game: Lots of Action, Not a Lot of Cash
The base game is a bit of a tease. You’ll actually hit a winning combo on about 1 in every 5 spins, which keeps the screen busy and is way more frequent than a lot of other BGaming slots.
The catch? The wins are tiny. We’re mostly talking about “keep your head above water” money – usually under 4x your bet. Even the top-paying symbols (the scroll and the gold ingot) only pay 15x for a full line. You might catch a wild in the right spot to connect a few lines for a 20x-ish bump, but basically, the base game just exists to keep your bankroll breathing while you wait for the bonus.
Also, a quick warning: don’t let the monkeys above the reels fool you. You’ll see special coins fly up into their little pots, but it’s literally just window dressing. The pots don’t trigger anything when they get full. You still need to land six standard coins on a single spin to trigger the bonus, meaning you will see a lot of dead spins where you land 4 or 5 coins alongside some wilds, and win absolutely zero.
The Bonus Feature: Where the Magic Happens
You can pay 50% extra per spin (the Chance x2 feature) to double your odds of hitting the bonus. Once you’re finally in the Hold & Win round, things get spicy.
You’ve got your standard cash coins, but the special modifier coins are the real MVPs:
- Expand: Makes the grid bigger.
- Boost: Pumps up the cash values of the other coins.
- Collect: The absolute star of the show.
Honestly, the “Collect” coin is the whole engine of this game. It sucks up every value on the board. But because it stays sticky, if you land another Collect coin later, it absorbs everything on the board including the first Collect coin. This snowball effect gets crazy. I’ve seen a late-arriving Collect hit for over 113x by itself. That’s actually more money than you get for the Mini (15x), Minor (50x), and almost the Major (150x) jackpots!
To get the big boys – the 1,000x Grand or 5,000x Royal jackpots – you have to completely fill the board with coins.
The Bonus Buys: Don’t Buy the Expensive One!
If you’re someone who likes to skip the line and buy the bonus, pay attention because the menu is totally backwards. You have two choices: pay 80x your bet for a random amount of modifiers, or a steep 200x to guarantee all three modifiers right out of the gate.
Here’s the crazy part: buying the expensive 200x bonus instantly expands your board to the max 25 spots. Why does that matter? Because the 1,000x Grand jackpot is awarded for filling a standard 15-spot board. By expanding the board instantly, the game quietly takes the 1,000x jackpot off the table!
You can still hit the 5,000x for filling all 25 spots, and the 200x buy usually pays itself back, but honestly? Stick to the cheaper 80x buy. It can randomly give you all three modifiers anyway, and it leaves both big jackpots in play.
Final Verdict
The math on this slot is shockingly player-friendly. It boasts a 97% RTP (Return to Player), which is incredibly generous these days. For context, similar expanding-grid games like Octoplay’s Outlaw Rails run at around 95.7%.
While BGaming’s recent Wincent Wolf has the same 97% RTP with double the max win, a 5,000x cap on a medium-volatility game like this is still a really solid target. It won’t brutally drain your wallet in the base game, and if you get a good chain reaction of Collect coins in the bonus, it can snowball into a massive payout.
Just stick to the cheaper bonus buy, and don’t let those fake monkey pots stress you out!
