Rabbit in the Hat 2

Five hat types can appear above the reels at once in Rabbit in the Hat 2, Slingshot Studios' sequel to the 2015 Microgaming original that first tied wild symbols to hats with bunny ears poking out. The follow-up, released in 2024, keeps the illusionist setting: a magician and his assistant flank a stage-style reel grid inside a heavily draped theatre, with a retro, hand-drawn art style that calls to mind old point-and-click adventure games, backed by an oompah band on the soundtrack.

The game runs on a 5-reel, 3-row grid with 20 fixed paylines, awarding wins for three or more matching symbols landing from the leftmost reel. Card values 9 through A make up the low-paying symbols, worth 1-2x the stake for a five-of-a-kind line, while the paytable moves up through wands, locked boxes, treasure chests, and the magician's assistant and the magician himself, each paying 5-10x for five in a row. A bunny-in-a-hat wild appears across every reel, substitutes for all regular symbols, and pays up to 50x the bet for five wilds on a line.

Where its 2015 predecessor leaned closer to medium volatility, this sequel is rated high, and its return to player defaults to 96.08% from a choice of three configurations that also include 94.21% and 92.13%. Stakes run from 20c up to $20 a spin, and hit frequency is listed at 27.67%.

The Hat Feature drives most of the base game: between one and five hats can hover above the reels, each moving one position to the left with every spin. Landing a wild beneath a hat pays out its prize — more than one hat can be awarded on the same spin — and any hat that reaches the far-left reel without being claimed disappears before the next spin. Held scatter counts and hat positions carry over between spins at a given bet level. The hats can trigger several different effects: some award a hidden scatter symbol that stays in play until enough scatters land to launch free spins, others award a wild multiplier of x2, x3 or x5, and others turn a reel into a walking wild that shifts one position left every spin or turn a whole reel wild outright. A further hat effect awards letters toward the Collection Prize ladder — Mini and Minor letters in the base game, with Major and Grand letters added once free spins are running.

That Collection Prize ladder pays 15x the bet for a completed Mini set, 50x for Minor, 250x for Major and 2,500x for Grand, and the base game can also hand out a random Major or Grand win once all of its letters have already been gathered. Mini and Minor letters collected during free spins carry back into the base game rather than resetting.

Landing three or more scatters triggers free spins, with four or five scatters also paying an instant 10x or 50x the stake on top. Once inside the round, a hat appears above every reel at the start and a fresh one lands above the rightmost reel on each subsequent spin, and a wheel decides which of four free spins modes is played: a 20-spin Collection Prize round, or one of three 10-spin rounds built respectively around wild multipliers, static wild reels, or walking wild reels — all four can retrigger. After the wheel lands, players can pay to upgrade to a stronger version of that mode through the Upsizer, and at the very end of the round a further spin can be bought for a price the game calculates on the spot. Skipping straight to the feature costs 50x the bet as a standalone buy, and the maximum win across the whole game is capped at 5,000x the stake.