Carol of the Elves

Picture all types of holiday decorations, take away the trees and the reindeer and you pretty much there when it comes to what this game looks like. You would imagine that with a name that suggests unwanted singing outside your front door, the kind of people at Yggdrasil for sure took this into consideration and went the mellow route.

It feels a little like the theme music was inspired by the first Home Alone movie, when Macaulay Culkin was still cute, but without the stress of having to fight off Joe Pesci with traps made out of toys and paint cans.

Carol of the Elves is played on a 5×5 grid and wins come from 3 or more symbols on adjacent reels. When you’re in the base game you will notice that all 4 corners are blocked by ice. This means that you have 1 spot open on the left reel, 3 on the second, 5 in the middle, then 3 and 1 again to form a diamond shape across the reels.

Every symbol that’s part of a winning combination will remove 1 ice block to give you more room for winnings on the subsequent re-spin. Once all ice blocks are removed you have the full 5×5 grid to play on. This is where you will have to start paying a little attention.

Winning symbols will either fill up the meter to the left (win multipliers) or to the right (extra life). These really come in handy once you’re playing on the full screen. Still, a winning re-spin means that you continue regardless. Anyway, here’s how they work:

Once you’re out of lives and a re-spin is without winnings, the game will revert back to the base game with all four corners covered again. That’s pretty much it in a nutshell. As you can see, the gameplay in Carol of the Elves is very easy.

With no special symbols available, all symbols are paying symbols as long as they are on at least three adjacent reels, but symbols are also stacked which means that you can have more than one winning symbol on the same reel. The best paying symbols are, in order: Reindeer, Polar bear, Fox, Rabbit, Ace, King, Queen, Jack, 10, and 9.

And before you ask, yes, this slot is of course available on all kinds of handheld devices from mobiles to tablets, laptops and desktops.

The RTP of 96.2% is pretty decent when you consider the volatility. And with this being a slot from Yggdrasil, you will find that you can set limits such as bet and loss per session, day, week or month. Every hour you will also get a reminder to let you know for how long you have been playing and how much you’ve either won or lost during that period.

For a non-jackpot slot, paying out close to 900k on a single spin is pretty amazing. Fair enough, most of the stars in the universe will have to line up just the right way for this to happen, but do you think it’s any different from winning a progressive jackpot?

Looks like both you and Jiminy Cricket will be wishing upon stars like dreamers do this holiday season. You know how it goes: “Like a bolt out of the blue, fate steps in and sees you through. When you wish upon a star, your dreams come true.”