Finn's Golden Tavern

Our slot of the month for December 2019 is Finn’s Golden Tavern by NetEnt – the sequel to the 2017 game Finn and the Swirly Spin.  This time round – perhaps in order to avoid accusations of appealing to under 18s – the game is set in a bar and many of the symbols are drink receptacles.  Like the original, Finn’s Golden Tavern is played on a 5 x 5 array with a unique spiral reel.  It has RTP of 96.1% and spin value starts at 10p.

How To Play Finn’s Golden Tavern

If you’ve played Finn and the Swirly Spin you will be familiar with the spiral reel concept, but in case you haven’t it works like this:

1. 25 symbols are arranged in a clockwise spiral starting at bottom left and spiraling in to the middle.  The outermost symbol is always the Free Spins Chest.
2. Any vertical or horizontal lines of 3 or more of the same symbol score
3. Winning combos explode and the other symbols spiral in towards the middle (the Avalanche feature) to fill the gaps.
4. The Wild symbol does not appear on the initial spin.  If a winning combo does not contain a Wild, one appears in one of the empty spaces after the winning combo explodes but before the Avalanche takes place.
5. If a winning combo (created after at least one Avalanche has already taken place) DOES contain a Wild, all symbols horizontally or vertically adjacent to the Wild explode with it regardless of whether they are part of the combo.
6. If a cascade of wins and Avalanches carries the Free Spins Chest all the way to the centre space (marked with an X), the free spins bonus round is triggered.

Finn’s Golden Tavern has a rather unusual paytable and this where it is quite different to the original game.  The four regular symbols, which are all drink receptacles, all pay the same amount.  Then there’s the coin symbol, which comes in 4 different denominations.  A combo of coins wins regardless of denominations, and pays out the face value of the coins in it.

Finn’s Golden Tavern has three bonus features:

Fist Slam

The Fist Slam Feature can activate randomly on a no-win spin in the base game, if there are two coin symbols next to each other and a third one somewhere else on its own.  Finn slams down is fist and jolts the single coin to swap with another symbol to put it next to the other two and create a win

Random Coin

The Random Coin Feature can activate randomly after all wins and avalanches are finished.  1 or 2 drinks symbols in the central position and/or the 8 spaces surrounding it are turned to coins of random value.

Free Spins

Unlike the original which had several free spins modes, Finn’s Golden Tavern has just one (although it can be retriggered if the chest reaches the central square during the free spins).  It consists of 5 free spins with a multiplier meter that starts at 1 and goes up with every 5 wilds that appear.  Although the base game is not very high variance, getting lucky with the Avalanche feature during free spins can send the multiplier meter up and result in some quite big wins.

All in all, this is how a sequel ought to be done – it has many of the unusual and appealing features of the original without being a carbon copy.

Where To Play Finn’s Golden Tavern