Slots Like Area Link Piggy Bank: Three Piggy Banks That Rewrite the Respin Round
Area Link Piggy Bank is a five reel, three row slot from AreaVegas, played across 20 fixed paylines on a teal reel frame set against a mountain of gold coins. The RTP is 96.45%, stakes run from £0.20 to £50 a spin, and the top prize is 5,000x your stake, paid as the Grand tier of a four-level ladder that sits down the left of the screen throughout. Volatility is rated high by most trackers, with a hit frequency a little under 29%. What sets it apart from the rest of the coin-lock crowd is that the bonus round can change its own rules while it is running: three coloured piggy banks sit above the reels waiting to be collected, and each one does something different to the coins already locked in front of you. Anyone looking for slots like Area Link Piggy Bank should be hunting for that combination of locked cash coins, mid-feature upgrades and a fixed Mini to Grand jackpot ladder.
Where to Play
18+ only. T&Cs apply. Please gamble responsibly.
How the Game Works
Reviewed by Brian TaylorPublished: July 2026
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The setup is about as blunt as slot themes get. You are looking at a hill of gold coins the size of a sand dune, a teal and gold reel frame in the middle of it, and three cartoon piggy banks in purple, red and green perched above the grid. There is no story, no characters and no narrative arc. AreaVegas has simply drawn money, then drawn more money behind it, and left the mechanics to do the talking. The soundtrack is a light casino jingle that stays out of the way, and the whole thing loads quickly on a phone, which matters more for a game you will be spinning in short bursts than any amount of art direction would.
Base game spins pay left to right across the 20 fixed lines. With a hit frequency of 28.68%, something lands on a bit under three spins in ten, but the paytable is deliberately shallow, so most of those hits are small change against your stake. That is the trade AreaVegas has made: it keeps enough of a return trickling back to make a session feel alive, while reserving the actual money for the Area Link round. If you have played Gold Blitz or any of the Lock It Link family you will recognise the shape of it immediately, because the base game is essentially a waiting room.
Where the game earns its keep is the moment gold coins start appearing. Each one carries a printed cash value rather than a symbol payout, and once enough of them land at once the reels stop behaving like reels and start behaving like a grid you are trying to fill. The three piggy banks above the grid are what stop the round being a straight copy of every other hold and win, and they are collected during the feature rather than chosen at the start, so you never quite know which version of the bonus you are going to end up playing.
Symbols and Paytable
No official paytable for this title exists in the public domain, so everything below was pieced together from independent trackers and then checked against the game’s own info panel. Treat the paytable at whichever casino you are playing as the definitive version. The premium symbols are all money: stacked banknotes, gold bars, a stack of coins, a diamond and a jewelled ring. Card ranks from 9 up to Ace fill the bottom of the ladder and pay around 1x your stake at most for a full five of a kind. The premiums are not much richer, topping out around 2.5x for five, with the largest base game spins trackers have logged reaching roughly 10x once several lines pay together.
The wild is a crystal dollar sign and it is the biggest paying individual symbol on the reels at roughly 5x for five of a kind, which is more than any premium manages on its own and tells you plenty about how the maths is weighted. Anything bigger than that in the base game comes from several lines paying on the same spin rather than from one symbol running the row. It appears on every reel, often stacked, and substitutes for everything except the gold coins. That exception matters more than it sounds: a screen full of wilds will not help you trigger the Area Link round, because coins only ever count as themselves.
Bonus Features Explained
The Area Link Respin Round
Land six or more gold coins on a single spin and the Area Link feature starts. Every coin already on screen locks where it is, the rest of the grid clears, and you get three respins. Any new coin that lands locks too and resets the counter back to three, so a round that looks finished can keep going for a long time if the coins keep coming. When a respin produces nothing new, the round ends and everything locked is paid out at once. Board out the full grid of fifteen spaces before the respins expire, though, and the Grand jackpot lands in place of that coin total, which is the only route to 5,000x.
Coin values scale with your total bet rather than being fixed cash amounts, so the numbers you see printed on them at a £2 spin will look very different at 20p. In the screenshot below you can see locked coins carrying values from 0.50 up to 6.00, alongside the prompt reminding you what filling every position is worth.
The Three Piggy Bank Upgrades
This is the part that makes the game worth writing about. Above the reels sit three piggy banks, and collecting one during the Area Link round changes what the round does from that point on. The red bank applies a multiplier of 2x, 3x or 5x to the coins you have already locked, which is the one that turns an ordinary round into a memorable one. The purple bank opens a second, separate reel set below the first, and both then fill independently, effectively doubling the space you are working with. The green bank brings in special collect coins that instantly pay the combined total of everything currently locked on screen, banking the round’s value more than once instead of only at the end.
Because they are collected rather than picked, you can end up with more than one active in the same round. A purple followed by a red is the combination worth hoping for, since a doubled grid with a 5x sitting on top of it is where the larger non-jackpot wins come from. That layered structure is also why the feature is more interesting to watch than a standard three-respin hold and win, where the only variable is how many coins land.
The Jackpot Ladder
Four fixed tiers run down the left of the screen and stay visible at all times. Mini pays 10x your stake, Minor pays 20x, Major pays 500x and Grand pays 5,000x. At a £2 total bet that reads as 20, 40, 1,000 and 10,000 on screen. They are fixed multipliers rather than pooled progressives, which means two useful things: the top prize is genuinely reachable at any stake level, and nobody else playing the game can take it before you get there. Jackpot symbols turn up as special coins inside the Area Link round, and the Grand can also be won outright by covering the whole grid.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- The three piggy bank upgrades give the respin round real variety, and collecting more than one in a round genuinely changes how it plays out
- A 28.68% hit frequency is generous for a game rated high volatility, so the base game does not feel completely dead between features
- Fixed jackpot tiers scale with your stake, so the 5,000x Grand is on the table at 20p a spin as much as at £50
- 96.45% is a shade above the UK online average, and there is no evidence of the reduced RTP configurations that plague a lot of comparable releases
- The purple bank’s second reel set is a smarter grid expansion than the usual extra row, because both sets keep filling independently
Cons
- Not a single free spins mode is built into the game, so a cold run of coins leaves you with a bare base game and no secondary bonus to fall back on
- The paytable is very thin, with premiums topping out near 2.5x, which makes base game wins feel token rather than satisfying
- The theme is money for the sake of money, with none of the character AreaVegas managed on its Rush Express titles
- AreaVegas publishes almost nothing officially, so exact paytable values and even the release date have to be pieced together from third-party trackers
- Wilds do not substitute for coins, which means a wild-heavy screen can look promising and still leave you no closer to the bonus
Game Screenshot
The Area Link round in progress: locked gold coins carrying their cash values, unfilled positions still showing card and diamond symbols, and the reminder that covering every space pays the Grand.
Demo Play
Load Area Link Piggy Bank below and spin it with free credits. It is the same 20 lines, the same coin values and the same Area Link maths as the real-money version, with no deposit and no sign-up. Worth a few minutes purely to see how long the base game can go without dropping six coins. 18+.
Game Information
Expert Take
Reception has been quietly positive rather than enthusiastic. The consensus across the trackers that cover it is that the maths is sound and the upgrade system is a genuine idea, but the presentation does the game no favours: a pile of coins and three cartoon pigs is not going to win anyone over on looks. The absence of a free spins round divides opinion more than anything else. Some players read it as focus, others as a game that only has one thing to show you. Having spent a while with it, the honest position is somewhere in between. When the purple bank opens the second grid and a red multiplier lands on top, it is one of the better hold and win rounds AreaVegas has built. When it does not trigger for eighty spins, there is nothing else happening.
Similar Slots to Try
Four games that each pick up a different thread: the studio, the mechanic, the pigs and the theme.
The other AreaVegas game reviewed here. Same studio, same four-tier ladder, but the collecting happens on a counter above the reels rather than inside a locked respin round.
Built by AreaVegas’s sister studio SpinPlay on the same lock-and-respin idea. Worth a spin if you want to see how the two teams handle the format differently.
Pigs, locked coins and a jackpot ladder again, this time with the Lock It Link mechanic and a much bigger name behind it.
A brighter, sillier pig slot that trades the fixed ladder for a ticket collection round. The obvious pick if the theme is what pulled you in.
About the Developer
Area Link Piggy Bank comes from AreaVegas Games, a Las Vegas studio founded by CEO Anton Kuhlmann and COO Serena Petersen, the same pair behind SpinPlay Games. AreaVegas released its first title, Area Link Phoenix, in April 2023 and took SlotCatalog’s Rookie of the Year at the 2024 CasinoBeats Game Developer Awards not long after. Everything it makes goes out exclusively through Games Global, whose UK Gambling Commission software and game host licences are what put AreaVegas titles in front of UK players at all. The catalogue now runs past 40 games and splits into a handful of tight series: Area Link for coin-lock respins, Rush Express for cash collect, plus the smaller Area Cash, Area Blast, Area Surge and Area Build’R lines.
AreaVegas has a handful of other reviews on SlotsLike, and the three closest to this one are shown below. The two Area Link entries are the closest relatives to this one, sharing the same respin engine and the same four-tier ladder with a different set of upgrade symbols bolted on. The rest of the catalogue, Area Link Phoenix and Gold Rush Express among it, is listed on the developer page while those reviews are written.
AreaVegas’s gem-mining Rush Express title, driven by a running diamond counter and a split between standard and Diamond free spins.
The bank-heist entry in the same series, running five piggy banks instead of three but feeding the identical 5,000x Grand.
Swaps the coin pile for a volcano and the piggy banks for four dragon eggs, keeping the coin-lock respins intact.
Area Link Piggy Bank Key Stats
Area Link Piggy Bank slot information last reviewed: July 2026.
| Area Link Piggy Bank Slot Info | |
|---|---|
| Name: | Area Link Piggy Bank |
| Provider: | AreaVegas |
| Developer Rank: | Our estimate: 5th of the 40-plus games AreaVegas has shipped since 2023, and third in the Area Link line behind Bank Boss and Wolf |
| RTP: | 96.45% (one UK operator lists it as 96.46%, so check the in-game info screen) |
| RTP Category: | Medium-High |
| RTP Rank: | 688 |
| Feature Description: | Gold coin symbols lock for three respins, and red, purple or green piggy banks collected during the round add multipliers, a second reel set or instant payouts before it ends. |
| Feature Categories: | Coin Lock Respins, Hold and Win, Fixed Jackpots, Stacked Wilds |
| Reels: | 5 |
| Rows: | 3 |
| Paylines: | 20 fixed |
| Volatility: | High (VegasSlotsOnline rates it medium, so treat it as sitting at the top of the medium band at worst) |
| Volatility Rank: | High |
| Min Bet: | £0.20 |
| Max Bet: | £50 |
| Max Win: | 5,000x stake (the Grand jackpot) |
| Release Date: | Disputed. Review coverage dates from October 2023, while trackers list 13 March 2024 and 24 October 2024 |
| Slotslike Rank: | 1,186 out of 4,300+ games (View Top 100) |
Slots with the Same Features
This game sits in two categories on the site: coin lock respins and fixed jackpot ladders. It also carries stacked wilds, and its 96.45% figure places it on the medium-high RTP slots list alongside the high volatility slots directory.
Hold and Win Coin Respins
Games where locking coins and respinning is the main event. The full list lives on the hold and win slots page.
Three pigs again, this time on Olympus, with pot symbols that lock and respin toward a prize ladder of their own.
A stripped-back hold and win where the whole game is the coin respin, so it makes a good comparison for how much the piggy bank upgrades actually add.
Fixed Jackpot Ladders
Prizes set as multiples of your stake rather than pooled progressives, so the top tier is reachable on any bet. More of them on the jackpot slots page.
Five fixed tiers instead of four, topping out at the same 5,000x, with two separate routes into the ladder.
The sequel keeps the fixed jackpot ladder and adds more grid space, which is roughly what the purple piggy bank does here.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does the Area Link feature work in Area Link Piggy Bank?
Six or more gold coin symbols lock in place and start you with three respins. Each coin carries a cash value tied to your total bet, every new coin that lands resets the counter back to three, and the round ends when a respin brings nothing new. Collect a red piggy bank and a 2x, 3x or 5x multiplier is applied to the locked coins; a purple one opens a second reel set that fills independently; a green one drops special coins that instantly pay the combined value of everything locked. Cover all fifteen positions and the Grand pays.
What is the RTP of Area Link Piggy Bank?
96.45% on the standard build, which most trackers agree on. One UK operator publishes it as 96.46%, a rounding difference rather than a separate configuration. Either way it lands in the medium-high band, near the top of the 96.00% to 96.49% range, so it is a shade above the UK online average.
What is the maximum win on Area Link Piggy Bank?
5,000x your stake, paid as the Grand jackpot for filling every position on the grid with coin symbols during the Area Link round. At a £2 spin that is the 10,000.00 figure shown at the top of the prize ladder.
Is Area Link Piggy Bank high volatility?
Most sources say yes, and the maths backs it up: a 28.68% hit frequency means roughly seven spins in ten return nothing, and almost all of the win potential sits inside the respin round. VegasSlotsOnline is the outlier and rates it medium, so read it as high volatility with a fairly generous hit rate rather than a brutal one.
What are the best slots like Area Link Piggy Bank?
Diamond Rush Express is the closest for studio feel, since it is AreaVegas running the same jackpot ladder through a cash collect meter instead. Amazing Link Athena from sister studio SpinPlay is the nearest mechanical relative, and Huff N More Puff is the obvious pick if it is the pigs-and-locked-coins combination you are after.
Can I play Area Link Piggy Bank for free?
Yes. There is a free demo of the game embedded on this page, and most Games Global network casinos that carry the title offer a practice mode too. It is a sensible way to see how often the respin round actually triggers before you stake anything real.
Who makes Area Link Piggy Bank?
AreaVegas Games, a Las Vegas studio founded by Anton Kuhlmann and Serena Petersen that distributes exclusively through Games Global. It is one of the studio’s Area Link series, the line that opened with Area Link Phoenix in April 2023.
Does Area Link Piggy Bank have free spins or a bonus buy?
No bonus buy, and no scatter-triggered free spins round in the usual sense. The Area Link respin feature is the whole bonus, which is unusual for a modern release and worth knowing before you go hunting for a scatter that is not there. One review site lists free spins for the game, but nothing in the paytable or the demo supports it.
Our Verdict on Area Link Piggy Bank
Area Link Piggy Bank is a better game than it looks. The artwork is lazy and the base game is thin, but the upgrade system inside the respin round is a real idea, properly executed, and the fact that you collect the piggy banks mid-feature rather than picking one up front keeps the round unpredictable in a way most hold and win slots are not. A 96.45% RTP with no reduced configurations doing the rounds is a point in its favour too. The missing free spins round is the sticking point: it leaves the game with a single gear, and if the coins are not landing there is genuinely nothing else to do. Play it for the feature, not for the spins in between.
SlotsLike rating: 7.4/10