About Benny the Beer
Benny the Beer arrived on 5 October 2023, timed for Oktoberfest, complete with steins, pretzels and an anthropomorphic beer glass as its hero. Behind the deliberately cheerful dressing sits the Stackways engine, one of the more original mechanics Hacksaw Gaming has built.
The grid is a conventional 5 reels by 4 rows, which yields 1,024 ways to win at rest. Stakes run from €0.10 to €100, as on almost everything the studio ships. The twist comes from the Stackways symbols: each displays a number and fills its reel with that many identical symbols. Normal Stackways show a value of 2 to 4; the rarer Revealing Stackways run from 5 to 10 and can therefore cover a full reel. The symbol chosen is not random — the game picks whichever one produces the longest winning combination. When several reels stack at once, the ways-to-win counter climbs as high as 100,000.
That mechanism explains how the machine feels. With a hit rate of 37.79 %, more than one spin in three returns something, a figure few Hacksaw titles get close to. The trade-off is logical: volatility is published at 3 out of 5, a medium rating from a studio that usually declares 4 or 5. Benny the Beer is a long-session game, not a one-shot game.
Three bonus symbols trigger the Book of Stackways: 10 free spins during which two paying symbols are designated as special. When they land on three or more reels they stack according to their displayed value, exactly like base-game Stackways but with guaranteed priority. Three extra bonus symbols during the round add 4 spins; four symbols upgrade the round to the Super Book of Stackways, again with 4 additional spins.
The Super Book follows the same rules but designates four special symbols instead of two. It is the only configuration in which the 10,000x ceiling becomes genuinely plausible, and the only one that arguably justifies its purchase price.
There are a lot of buys here — five entries, which is plenty even by Hacksaw standards. BonusHunt FeatureSpins costs 3x the stake and multiplies the trigger probability of a single spin by five. Double Stack FeatureSpins at 25x guarantees at least two Stackways symbols, Triple Stack at 75x guarantees at least three. The Book of Stackways costs 120x and the Super Book 300x. A welcome detail: these modes run on a slightly higher RTP than the base game, between 96.29 % and 96.39 % depending on the option, against 96.17 % in normal play.
As always at Hacksaw, four versions circulate: 96.17 %, 94.17 %, 92.28 % and 88.26 %. The casino chooses, the player absorbs the difference, and the only way to know is to open the game's « i » menu. On a medium-volatility machine, where RTP shows up quickly over the length of a session, that check matters even more than usual.
Worth comparing with Stack'em and Ronin Stackways, which share the stacking engine, and with Fred's Food Truck for the comic register.
