Karamba first launched back in the noughties – or pretty much the dawn of time as far as online gambling goes. After many years as an Aspire Global casino, it has a whole new lease of life for 2024 after moving to the White Hat Gaming platform.
Karamba has been on the scene for getting on for 20 years now; it first appeared in 2005 and in fact it was the original Aspire casino, with slots, scratchcards and instant wins from just one supplier, Neogames. As you can imagine, even before the platform change it looked very different to the way it did then. Many more products had been added over the years, including a huge range of slot games and in 2018, a sportsbook.
As if branching out into sports wasn’t enough, they also planned a foray into bingo and even went so far as to publicise “Karamba Bingo” at an iGaming industry conference in 2019. Unfortunately, the plan was to use Microgaming bingo software but shortly afterwards, Microgaming announced that their bingo product was to be retired. For a while it looked as if Aspire were going to use a different bingo product (End2End) but this also failed to materialise and now that Karamba are not on Aspire any more, it never will.
In 2021, Karamba and several of Aspire Global’s other B2C casinos were sold to Esports Technologies (EBET) but just three years later EBET got into difficulties and the brands were sold on. The new owners Forvana Gaming are now making a complete break with Aspire by moving the casinos to the White Hat Gaming platform and licence. White Hat themselves are an extremely reputable platform provider who were amongst the first to have a full UK licence for remote gambling
After the platform move Karamba remains a casino/sportsbook combo that’s more colourful and memorable than most due to its rather unique mascot, a mauve and turquoise parrot depicted playing football, roulette and slots.
Opening an account at Karamba is a two step process – and one that you will need to go through even if you’ve played there when it was on Aspire Global. On the first screen, you give them your email address and pick a username and password. On the second, you fill in address, date of birth and phone number and choose which marketing communications you want to opt into. You can select email, phone and SMS separately and you can choose to hear from just Karamba or from partner casinos as well. Tick to accept the terms and conditions etc and you’re ready to go!
The very first thing you will see after registering is a pop up with safer gambling messaging. Confirm that you’ve read it and you’ll be given the option to set a reality check and deposit limits (but this is not compulsory). The final step before you can start playing is to check your email for the link they send you and use it to verify your account.
The casino part of the site is where you’ll find the slot games, quite literally thousands of them. And indeed, the sheer number of games poses an interesting problem as there’s no game categorisation beyond “new” for new releases, “jackpots” for, well, jackpots and”drops & wins” for players who want to know which games are currently included in Pragmatic Play’s network promotion.
If you want to find something else to play, you either need to search for it by name, search for it by game provider name (there’s a dropdown list), or browse through all of the games in the Slots tab, displayed in what appears to be no particular order but may be to do with how often they’ve been played. Searching by name works well if you are looking for, say, Slingo games or Megaways slots (there’s plenty of both, mixed in with everything else) but isn’t so great if you’re looking for games with a theme.
About that “jackpots area”; in there, you’ll find Jackpot King and Rapid Fire Jackpots by Blueprint, Red Tiger Daily Jackpots and IGT Megajackpots. It’s not the biggest selection but there’s something there for everyone.
The live casino at Karamba is mostly by Evolution and Pragmatic Play. There are tabs in the lobby for roulette, blackjack and poker but not for game shows. That’s not to say they have none of those – they have quite a few including Crazy Time, Mega Ball, Vegas Ball Bonanza and Extra Chilli Epic Spins, but they are mixed up with everything else in the Featured games part of the lobby.
Karamba also has a sportsbook. There’s a big emphasis on football betting, with a special “Top Leagues” menu to help you find the matches you’re interested in, but they cover a wide range of other sports as well and there’s a particularly good range of e-sports.
The promotions page at Karamba is currently looking a bit sparse, with just the aforementioned Drops & Wins plus another Pragmatic Play network promotion, but the site has a history of running extra promotions so we expect to see exclusives return once things have settled down after the change of platform.
The emphasis at Karamba remains very much on fun and with the new platform and welcome offer this venerable online casino is well worth a visit.
35 x (deposit+bonus) on slots, some games excluded (list in site T&C)
The Responsible Gambling Policy has details of all of their player protection tools. As well as the usual deposit limits, game time reminder (aka reality check), time-out and self exclusion, they have a couple of extras:
There’s also a self assessment test, safer gambling checklist and links to outside sources of advice and help.