Always Up! x10000 in detail
Always Up! x10000 was released on 4 February 2026, four months after Always Up!, whose bonus mechanic it reuses wholesale and widens. The setting is the same — Chinese New Year, lanterns, firecrackers, lotus flowers, ingots and golden purses against a night sky — but the grid moves from 3x3 to 5x3 and the lines from five to ten. The paytable is modest: the lowest symbol, a blue sign, returns 3 times the bet for five of a kind; the green, purple and red fireworks pay 12 times; premium symbols, from the lotus to the golden bag, climb from 12 to 500 times the bet for five in a row. That 500x is the absolute ceiling of what can be obtained without the bonus, and it matters for what follows. The RTP published by BGaming is 96.05%, a single value with no alternative tier flagged. The studio classes the game as "very high" volatility on its own sheet, while several independent listings settle for "high". We keep the supplier's value. The published hit frequency is 1 spin in 11.55, roughly 8.7% of spins paying: that is low, and it confirms the diagnosis — the base game is merely a corridor leading to the bonus. The bonus reuses the principle of the first game. Five rockets appear at the bottom of the screen, the player designates one and presses START. They all lift off, each carrying a multiplier that grows with altitude, and they burst into fireworks at randomly determined heights. The multiplier reached by the chosen rocket is applied to the stake. As in the first game, nothing distinguishes the five rockets before the draw: the pick is staging, not a decision. What is new, and it is substantial, is the ceiling system. The number of Scatters landed determines the maximum reachable during the round: three Scatters open a round capped at 999 times the bet, four at 2,997 times, five at 9,990 times. The player therefore knows the ceiling before the rockets even launch. That is uncommon transparency, and it changes the texture of the round: a three-Scatter round has no chance of producing a large win, and the game does not pretend otherwise. That leads straight to the most awkward observation about the title. The game is called x10000, yet no bonus tier allows 10,000 times the bet. The best, at five Scatters, stops at 9,990x. The 10,490x maximum multiplier shown at the top of the official sheet is explained by addition: 9,990x from a maximal bonus round, plus the 500x the premium symbol can produce in five of a kind on the base game of the same spin. The arithmetic works, but you have to reconstruct it yourself, and the game's name remains misleading by exactly ten units. The bonus buy comes in four formats. Eighty times the bet guarantees three Scatters and a 999x ceiling. Two hundred and forty times the bet guarantees four Scatters and a 2,997x ceiling. Eight hundred times the bet guarantees five Scatters and the maximum 9,990x ceiling. Alongside them, a Mystery Buy at one hundred times the bet assigns a randomised Scatter count and maximum multiplier. One calculation nobody seems to have run deserves stating. Divide each ceiling by its buy price: 999 over 80 gives 12.4875; 2,997 over 240 gives 12.4875; 9,990 over 800 gives 12.4875 again. All three tiers are priced on exactly the same ratio. None is a better buy than the others from a ceiling standpoint: the studio has simply offered the same deal at three different risk scales. It is a rigorous construction, rarely documented, and it has a direct practical consequence: choose your tier by the variance you are willing to absorb, not by a supposed value ranking, because the value is identical throughout. The bet range runs from 0.10 to 24 per spin. The ceiling is low, even for this studio, and it determines the advertised maximum win: 10,490 times 24 gives exactly €251,760, the figure BGaming publishes on its sheet. This is one of the rare titles in the catalogue where the advertised amount really is the product of the multiplier and the maximum stake, rather than the flat €250,000 cap the studio copies elsewhere. On the other hand, that 24 ceiling makes the 800x buy tier practically unusable at the top of the range: 19,200 for a single round.
