Tropicool

Two characters, Tony Toucano and Fiona Flamingo, hold down a frozen outpost near Antarctica in Elk Studios' Tropicool, building a tropical retreat out of snowflakes, frozen fruit, beach huts and palm trees rather than migrating anywhere warmer. The soundtrack leans into a laid-back reggae feel that occasionally kicks up a gear when the reels get busy.

Tropicool plays out on a 6x6 grid with no fixed paylines: any run of three or more matching symbols across neighbouring reels pays out regardless of row position, giving 46,656 ways to win in total. Wins clear the board and trigger an avalanche, dropping new symbols in to fill the gaps and potentially chain further wins from the same spin.

Fruit makes up most of the paytable — blue, green, yellow and red plums, moving up to apples, coconuts and strawberries — paying 0.3x to 2x the stake for six matching symbols in a line. Tony and Fiona sit above them as the top two symbols, each occupying three rows in height and paying 0.9x to 1.2x for six, and both count toward a win from any position as long as they're fully visible on the reels.

A feature reel above the main grid drops extras into play whenever an avalanche happens and there's a gap beneath a special symbol: a regular wild, a wild multiplier worth x2 to x5, a locked wild that holds its position through a fixed run of wins, or a row-conversion symbol that turns every other icon in its row (excluding wilds and bonus symbols) into one it picks. The number of bonus symbols landing sets the count: three opens 10 free drops, four opens 15, five opens 20, and six unlocks the full 25. During that round the feature reel can also produce an extra-spin symbol worth +1, +2 or +5 drops, or a multiplier symbol adding +1, +2 or +5 to a win multiplier that starts at x1 and carries over between drops without resetting.

Elk's X-iter menu adds five direct buy-in options: a fixed payout for 5x the stake, an entry with 3 locked wilds already in place for 25x, and three tiers of guaranteed free drops (3 to 6 bonus symbols) at 100x, 200x with a starting x5 multiplier, or 500x with a starting x10 multiplier. Across Tropicool, RTP holds at 95% in every mode, including all five X-iter options, with volatility rated 7 out of 10, a 23.1% hit frequency, a 10,000x maximum win and stakes from 0.20 to 100 per spin.