About Harlequin Carnival
Harlequin Carnival runs on five reels of three rows, listed as a 3-3-3-3-3 configuration on the official Nolimit City sheet. The studio does not publish a payline count there; SlotCatalog and Fruity Slots both give 20 fixed lines, permanently active, and that is the figure we carry.
The official RTP is 96.14%, meaning €3.86 of house edge per €100 staked. Nolimit breaks the number down: 58.99 points from the base game and 37.14 from the feature, adding to 96.14 within a hundredth of rounding. Put another way, 38.6% of the theoretical return runs through the Harlequin Bonus, a larger share than on Bonus Bunnies (35%).
Everything hangs on the Harlequin xNudge® Wild. The general xNudge principle, as Nolimit itself defines it, is straightforward: a wild that lands partially in view shifts up or down until it is fully visible, and its multiplier climbs by 1 with every step. Here the wild is three rows tall on a three-row grid, so it always ends up filling its reel. It needs zero, one or two steps to get there, which caps the base-game multiplier at x1, x2 or x3. Crucially, the official sheet specifies that several wild multipliers add to one another rather than multiply. Three reels of x3 wilds give x9, not x27 — far less explosive, and the main reason the game's ceiling stays where it does.
Every wild triggers the Harlequin Respins. The wild steps one reel to the left on each respin while the other reels spin again, and the sequence continues until it reaches the first reel. Scatters can be collected during those respins to open the feature.
The Harlequin Bonus needs three bonus symbols and awards 8 spins, with a guaranteed wild on reel 5 carrying an x3 multiplier. That multiplier climbs by 1 with every step to the left: x3 on reel 5, x4 on reel 4, x5 on reel 3, x6 on reel 2 and x7 when it reaches reel 1. Collecting three more bonus wilds launches another wild on reel 5, and each bonus wild adds a spin.
The published statistics are precise. Hit frequency: 28.11%, one winning spin every 3.6 spins. Feature: once every 181 spins. A win of 100x or more: once every 643 spins. The ceiling is 5,861x the stake — €1,172 at €0.20, €5,861 at €1 and €586,100 at the €100 maximum. No probability of reaching that ceiling is published. The official volatility index reads 10.31, the top of this batch but a long way from Mental (29.93).
The feature buy is active, priced at 70x the stake according to SlotCatalog and Fruity Slots, the studio publishing no price of its own. That puts the maximum win at just 84 times the cost of the buy, a poor ratio next to Dragon Tribe (27,000x for an 80x buy, or 337 times). The option is banned in the United Kingdom. Released 7 April 2020: several databases show 4 July, a confusion caused by the dd-mm-yyyy format of the official page.
