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The Base Game: Look, But Don’t Touch
Here’s the catch with Betsoft’s 3 Pots of Venice: the reels are covered in numbers that are basically just for show. You’ll see roses land with 1x, 2x, or 5x attached to them, but don’t get excited, you can’t actually collect that money in the base game. Instead, these roses act as tokens that fly up to feed the three colored pots above the screen. Until one of those pots decides to pop, those numbers are just window dressing.
The base game is a desert. It’s a very high-volatility slot (sitting at a 96.20% RTP), and it plays like one. You’ve got 25 paylines, but the payouts drop off a cliff after the top symbols. Five golden masks get you 10x your bet, but for the lower-tier symbols, you need to hit multiple lines just to win your money back. I started my session with eight dead spins in a row. Even when the board looks packed, like when I landed a 4x blue rose next to a wild, or three red roses at once, it often pays nothing because the pots just sit there, firmly shut.
The Bonus Game: It’s All About the Full Screen
When a pot finally bursts, the roses turn into gold coins and the Hold-and-Win bonus starts. You know the drill: coins lock in, and your respins reset to three.
The coins themselves aren’t going to make you rich, they mostly carry tiny values between 1x and 20x, alongside a few fixed jackpots that max out at 150x. The real goal here is a puzzle: you need to fill all 15 spaces on the grid. If you manage to fill the screen, you win the 4,000x GRAND prize. Everything else is small change leading up to that final empty square.
The three pots change how you play the bonus:
- Green (Extra): Gives you 4 respins instead of 3.
- Red (Multi): Drops multipliers (up to 20x) onto the grid to boost your coins.
- Blue (Double): The holy grail. It gives you two totally independent boards to play at once.
Here’s a crucial detail for jackpot hunters: you cannot hit the game’s 10,000x max win unless you trigger that Blue pot. Since one board caps out at 4,000x (plus whatever small coins you collected), you absolutely need two full boards and some heavy multipliers to even get close to the max win. If the Blue pot doesn’t pop, the game’s top prize is literally impossible to reach.
How It Compares to the Rest of the Series
If you follow Betsoft, you know this is the third game in their “3 Pots” series. They basically use the same skeleton and just swap out a feature or two. Lunar Wolf was the easy-going one. Olympus cranked up the volatility. Venice keeps that volatility, gives us a 10,000x max win, and makes the Double Board its star feature.
If you’re moving from Lunar Wolf to Venice, prepare for a shock. Venice only pays out on about 18% of your spins, so your balance is going to take a beating while you wait for a bonus. If you want a Hold-and-Win game that actually keeps you entertained and pays out frequently, go play Hacksaw’s 3 Adventures of Alice (it hits on over 40% of spins, though the max win is lower). Venice demands a big bankroll and a lot of patience.
The Bonus Buy: A Gamble Within a Gamble
If you’re tired of waiting, you can buy the bonus: 55x your bet for one pot, or 110x for two pots. But here’s the kicker, you don’t get to choose which pots activate.
This makes buying the bonus a gamble of its own. Paying 55x just to randomly get the Green pot (which just gives you one extra respin on a standard board) is a steep price for one extra respin, especially since you still have to fill all 15 spots to win anything decent.
The Verdict
I ended my session with a pretty heavy loss. 3 Pots of Venice isn’t hiding what it is: it’s a total grind. You are going to sit through long stretches of dead spins and teasing animations. When you finally get to the bonus, it’s a mad dash to fill the screen. Unless you hit that 4,000x GRAND prize or luck into the double board, the coins you collect along the way are just a mild rebate on the money you lost getting there.
