About Bomb Bonanza
Bomb Bonanza plays on a 5×5 grid of 25 positions with 50 fixed paylines. That is a significant correction against the data we held: our database described a 7×7 cluster game, which Pragmatic Play's official page contradicts. There are no clusters here, no cascades outside the bonus, and no Megaways.
The theme is a gold mine, with pickaxe and gold-pan symbols. The wild is a bomb, and the entire game is built around it.
In the base game, bombs can expand at random moments. The expansion takes the form of a square — 2x2, 3x3, 4x4 or 5x5 — and spreads in one of the four cardinal directions. A 5x5 wild landing on a 5×5 grid covers the whole screen: all twenty-five positions turn wild at once. Big Win Board notes that these expansions can overflow the visible frame, part of the bomb deploying outside the play area. SlotCatalog puts the maximum single-spin base game win at 600x.
The bonus triggers on scatters landing on reels 1, 3 and 5, and awards 6 free spins to start. That is short, but the feature is designed to extend itself. During the free spins, nuggets collect on a meter, and each tier cleared simultaneously improves bomb size and the number of spins remaining:
Tier 2, reached at five nuggets, unlocks 2x2 bombs and adds 4 spins. Tier 3 moves to 3x3 bombs and adds 2 spins. Tier 4 gives 4x4 bombs and 2 more spins. Tier 5 unlocks 5x5 bombs and one further spin. A bonus taken all the way therefore runs to 15 spins at most — 6 to start plus 9 earned along the way — finishing with wilds capable of covering the entire grid. Big Win Board and SlotCatalog place the trigger frequency at roughly 1 spin in 178.
The default RTP is 96.46%: on £100 staked, the house theoretically keeps £3.54 over the very long run. That is four hundredths below the studio's standard setting of 96.50%, which 503 of the 634 Pragmatic Play titles in our database carry to the hundredth. Two downgraded builds exist, at 95.50% and 94.50% according to Big Win Board — some databases put the lowest at 94.05%. In the 94.50% version, house margin climbs to £5.50 per £100 staked, 55% more than the high version.
Stakes run from £0.25 to £125 per spin, a conventional range for this studio. The maximum win is 2,015x, which is £503.75 at minimum stake, £2,015 at £1 and £251,875 at £125. Big Win Board gives odds of roughly 1 spin in 100 million, and itself rounds the ceiling to 2,000x — a fifteen-unit gap with no practical consequence.
That figure needs context, because it is low. The Pragmatic Play catalogue median is 10,000x, and 87.5% of the studio's games clear 5,000x. At 2,015x, Bomb Bonanza belongs to the bottom 6%: its summit is worth roughly a fifth of the house median. Yet volatility is rated 5 out of 5, the maximum. An extreme-variance game is justified by a ceiling that pays for the losing streaks; here, that ceiling is absent.
The release date comes in three versions: July 2022 per most sources, 24 June 2022 for SlotCatalog, 26 July 2022 for Big Win Board. We record July 2022 without settling the exact day. Finally, none of the sources we consulted — official page, SlotCatalog, Big Win Board — documents a bonus buy option on this title, although our database listed one at 100x the stake. We have removed it.
