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The Hold & Win market is incredibly crowded right now. To stand out, providers need a gimmick, and for Rival’s latest holiday release, Scrooge’s Bah Humbucks: Workshop Riches, that gimmick is all about real estate. Specifically, the dead center of the grid.
I sat down with this 243-ways, highly volatile slot to see if Scrooge is feeling generous this year. Here is what you need to know before you play.
The Base Game Grind
Played across a standard 5×3 grid, the base game operates exactly how you’d expect a high-volatility math model to behave: it’s mostly time spent waiting on the bonus.
Your premium symbols are Santa (paying a decent 18x for five-of-a-kind), the Elf Foreman, and Rudolph. However, a third of the standard paytable pays out less than your stake, meaning you’re mostly just trying to keep your balance afloat.
Scrooge acts as the Wild (reels 2-5 only). He comes with a multiplier, but there’s a problem that I found a bit frustrating: the multiplier is tied strictly to the number of Wilds in the winning way. Two wilds give you 2x, three give you 3x, etc. If a single Scrooge steps in to connect your win, as he did a few times during my session with some low-paying Nutcrackers: you get zero multiplier boost.
The Tease: Gift Boxes and the “Money Magnet”
As you spin, you’ll notice the reels are crowded with Gift Boxes carrying cash values between 1x and 10x. In the base game, these are just blockers. They do nothing but get in the way unless you hit the trigger threshold.
There are two ways into the bonus:
- The Hard Way: Land 6 Gift Boxes anywhere on the board.
- The Smart Way: Land 4 Gift Boxes, plus the Money Machine symbol in the exact middle square of the grid (reel 3, row 2).
This gives the base game a really sharp, fun focal point. You aren’t just counting scatter symbols; you are staring at that middle square. The near-misses can be brutal: I landed the Money Machine dead center a few times, but without the four accompanying boxes, it’s a dead spin.
The Hold & Win Bonus
When you finally trigger the bonus, the game turns into a standard 3-respin feature where blanks and boxes land. But how you triggered it changes everything.
If you triggered it the standard way (6 boxes), you’re playing a vanilla Hold & Win. You collect the boxes, and that’s it.
But if you triggered it with the Money Machine in the center, things get spicy. The machine turns into a “Money Magnet.” It collects the value of every single prize that lands. Furthermore, a meter below the reels builds up to a 4x multiplier based on how long the round lasts. At the end of the feature, that multiplier is applied to the Magnet’s collected total, which is then added to your locked boxes. It’s a massive double-dip, and the one route to a big total that doesn’t depend on filling the whole screen.
Jackpots and the 10,000x Chase
Alongside the 1x-10x boxes, you can land fixed jackpots: a 15x Mini, a 30x Minor, and a 200x Major.
The 10,000x Grand Jackpot, however, doesn’t land on the reels. You win it simply by filling all 15 positions on the board during the bonus. Rival runs a similar cash-collect Hold & Win in Golden Rails Express, but that one sits on a 3×3 grid with a 5,000x cap. By stretching this to 15 cells and doubling the max win, the full-screen chase is much harder, but incredibly rewarding.
For players who hate the base-game grind, Rival has included a 50x Bonus Buy. This is incredibly cheap by modern slot standards and actually bumps the RTP up slightly from 96.13% to 96.20%.
