Carnival Queen 2

A dynamic grid and exploding wild symbols carry Carnival Queen 2, Thunderkick's sequel arriving six years after the original Carnival Queen, into a moving street parade with spectators watching from buildings either side and fireworks overhead. The reels land anywhere from two to seven symbols each, shifting the ways count from spin to spin: the default is 5,040 ways to win, with reels able to grow well beyond that as the round develops.

Symbols keep to a carnival typeface: 9 through A card ranks pay 1x to 1.5x the stake for six of a kind, while four costumed characters and a crown pay 2x to 10x for the same combination. Wins are read from the leftmost reel outward, and every winning combination clears through an avalanche, dropping fresh symbols in to chain further wins on the same spin.

The wild here is built to disrupt the board rather than sit quietly in a combination. It substitutes for everything except the scatter, and after resolving any win it always explodes, destroying every symbol on its own reel plus one random symbol on each of the others, unless a symbol is protected or already part of a win. Each time a wild's reel explodes it grows by one row, up to a maximum of seven, and as reels grow the ways count climbs toward a ceiling of 117,649; no more than two wilds can be in play at once. A separate Instant Multiplier tracks alongside this: it opens at 1x, adds 1x for every avalanche within a spin, applies across the whole chain, and resets once the base game spin finishes, with no cap on how high it can climb mid-chain.

Three scatters open the Bonus Game at 12 free spins, with four more added for each extra scatter beyond three, and the round begins carrying over whatever multiplier value the triggering spin reached. Inside the feature, landing two scatters adds three further spins, with two more for every scatter past that. Four paid entry points sit alongside natural triggers: a 1.5x or 3x stake surcharge doubles or quintuples the base chance of hitting a bonus round, a 10x surcharge trades for roughly one bonus round every ten spins on average, and a 5x surcharge guarantees a wild lands on the very first drop of a spin. Players can also buy straight into the free spins for 100x the stake, or into the bonus game with a 10,000-way minimum for 175x.

Thunderkick rates Carnival Queen 2 as high volatility, with an RTP of 94.18%, a maximum win of 25,000x the stake and bets from 0.10 to 100 per spin. The reel growth from exploding wilds and the uncapped Instant Multiplier together give the game its highest win potential during a single long chain.