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I’ve played enough Egyptian-themed slots to fill a real-life pyramid, so it takes a lot for a new mummy game to catch my attention. But Thunderkick has managed to do just that with Tutan Kha-boom. Instead of just giving us another Book-style slot, they’ve literally turned the standard slot layout on its side.
Playing out on a 3-reel, 5-row grid, the game features 99 connecting pay ways that read from the bottom up rather than left to right. It’s a little disorienting for the first few spins, but once you get the hang of the cascading mechanics and the multiplier ladder, it turns into a tactical, surprisingly tense ride.
Here is how my session went, and what you need to know before you play.
The Base Game: A Grind with a Purpose
Let’s be completely fair upfront: the base game paytable is incredibly top-heavy, almost brutally so. The Pharaoh mummy is the only symbol that pays your bet back on a basic three-row connection. The rest of the colored mummies pay fractions of your stake on three or four rows, and even a full run to the top row keeps the two cheapest under it.
Because the base payouts are so low, you quickly realize that standard wins are just vehicles to step up the Multiplier Ladder.
Every time you get a winning connection, the symbols explode, new ones drop in, and your multiplier doubles. Your first win is x1, the next cascade is x2, and it climbs all the way to x32 in the base game. During my session, I hit a pretty cold stretch of dead spins, interrupted only by tease scatters. However, when the cascades finally link up, the ladder proves its worth. I had one chain reaction hit the x16 multiplier for a nice 25.4x win on cheap symbols, and another run that rode the explosions all the way to the x32 cap for a 29.9x return. Those two hits kept my bankroll afloat while waiting for the bonus.
The Exploding Wilds: A Clever Mechanic
The real star of the base game is the Exploding Wild. When this symbol goes off, it clears its entire row and column. But what makes this mechanic genuinely brilliant is what the blast leaves behind.
The explosion vaporizes the cheap mummies, but it spares Scatters and the premium Pharaohs. A well-placed Wild will strip all the junk off the grid, leaving the top-paying Pharaohs to drop into place just as your multiplier doubles. It’s a highly satisfying mechanic that makes you actively root for grid destruction.
Free Spins: Raising the Floor
Land three Scatters, and you trigger 10 Free Spins. This is where Tutan Kha-boom shows its true potential.
The grid and paytable remain the same, but the multiplier ladder grows a locked x64 step, and the rules of the multiplier change entirely. Instead of resetting to x1 on every new spin, the multiplier resets to a “floor”, and you can raise that floor by collecting Wilds.
Every three Wilds you collect strips the lowest multiplier off the ladder and adds an extra spin. If you collect enough, your minimum multiplier floor rises to x2, x4, and eventually x32. Collect 15 Wilds, and you unlock the massive x64 step.
Because the lower-tier mummies pay so little, the entire math model of Tutan Kha-boom leans heavily on the Pharaoh symbol and the multiplier ladder. The ultimate dream in this game is collecting enough Wilds early in the free spins to push your floor to x32 or x64, leaving your final few spins to drop Pharaohs onto a maxed-out multiplier.
