Slots Like Bad Santa: Three Beer Glasses, Three Separate Bonus Rounds
Bad Santa is a five reel, three row slot from Endorphina that drops Father Christmas into a bar in a leather jacket and sunglasses and lets him drink his way through his own shift. It runs on 30 fixed paylines at a published RTP of 96.04%, volatility is rated high, and stakes cover a wide spread from £0.30 up to £150 a spin across 32 preset levels. Three glasses stand on the bar above the reels, one each for the Hold Beer lock and respin round, the 26 spin Drunk Games free spins and the Boozy Guns pick round, and filling a glass is what sets that bonus running. The confirmed ceiling is the ULTRA jackpot of 1,000x the total bet inside Hold Beer, though some databases quote a higher combined figure. Anyone hunting for slots like Bad Santa is really looking for two things at once, a Christmas theme that refuses to be sweet and a bonus structure with more than one door into it.
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 simple enough. Santa has clocked off, the reindeer has joined him, and the pair of them are propped against a bar surrounded by a crowd of drinkers in sunglasses and antlers who look thoroughly pleased about the whole thing. Behind the reels you can make out crates of bottles, wooden barrels, a fireplace and a lit Christmas tree, and the game logo glows in neon at the top right of the screen. It is a warmer, scruffier look than the snowy landscapes most festive slots default to, and it does a lot of work in convincing you that this is a night out rather than a Christmas card.
Every spin covers 30 fixed lines across a standard 5 by 3 grid, so there is no ways to win arithmetic to keep track of and no adjustable line count. Wins pay from the leftmost reel, wilds land on reels two through five only, and Santa himself is the wild symbol, shouting as he lands. The three glasses above the reels fill as you play, and that slow accumulation is the whole rhythm of the game. On the capture below, taken at a 30 euro bet in the demo, a single line pays 15 euro toward a 45 euro spin total, which is about the size of hit the base game hands out between features.
Because so much of the return is parked inside those three rounds, the base game feels quiet, and the high volatility rating is honest rather than marketing. Bad Santa suits players who enjoy watching a meter creep upward and can sit through a stretch of flat spins to get there. It is a poor fit if you want a steady drip of small wins, and it is worth saying that the humour is broad and the drinking is central, so if that theme sits badly with you there is nothing else here to enjoy.
Symbols and Paytable
The lower end of the paytable is built from tumblers of spirits carrying the four card suits, a green glass for clubs, blue for spades, red for hearts and amber for diamonds. Above them sit pub props rather than the usual card royals, a black pool eight ball and a green and red dartboard with a dart buried in it, then a fan of aces, and the reindeer sits at the top of the regular symbols. Santa is the wild and substitutes for the paying symbols. Endorphina publishes only the top of the ladder on its own game page, a five of a kind of Rudolf paying 40x the base bet, and leaves every other value to the in game paytable. We would rather leave a number out than invent one, so open that paytable at your casino for the exact values running on the version you are playing.
Bonus Features Explained
The three glasses on the bar are labelled Hold Beer, Drunk Games and Boozy Guns, and each one is tied to a different drink. Endorphina describes the lager glass as the trigger for Hold Beer, the ale glass for Drunk Games and the stout glass for Boozy Guns. They fill independently, so one can be nearly full while another has barely started, and that is what gives the game its odd sense of three separate clocks running at once.
The Pile Feature
Endorphina lists a Pile Feature among Bad Santa’s core mechanics on its own game page, next to Hold and Win, Pick Game, Free Games, Jackpots and Character, and it is the part that keeps the three glasses moving. The studio describes blue, yellow and green bottle tokens landing on the reels in both the base game and the free games, then flying off the grid and setting a bonus running. That is the collection layer of the slot, and it is why the glasses sit at three different heights on any given spin instead of rising together.
Hold Beer Bonus
Hold Beer is the lock and respin round, and it is the only route to the top prize. The grid clears to 15 positions and fills with gold bottle caps carrying cash values, starting from five bonus symbols with three respins on the clock. Every fresh cap that lands sticks and resets the respin counter, so the round runs as long as you keep hitting. Four jackpot plaques sit beside the reels, and at the stake we captured they are worth 50x, 100x, 300x and 1,000x the total bet. Fill all 15 positions and the ULTRA plaque is yours, which is the 1,000x figure Endorphina quotes as the game ceiling.
Drunk Games Free Spins
Filling the ale glass awards 26 free games, an unusually specific number that Endorphina seems to have picked for the joke rather than for any maths reason. The counter runs along the bottom of the screen during the round, and scatters landing inside it can either extend the count or push you sideways into Hold Beer or Boozy Guns without ending the free games. That crossover is the most interesting piece of design in the whole slot, because it turns what would be a routine free spins round into something that can branch.
Boozy Guns Pick Bonus
Boozy Guns hands Santa a pair of gold revolvers and puts a wall of bottle crates in front of him. You shoot bottles to reveal prize tiles in four colours, and the round ends once three matching tiles appear. On the capture we took, at a 30 euro bet, the four prize plaques above the crates read green 600, blue 1,500, purple 6,000 and red 15,000 euro, which works out at 20x, 50x, 200x and 500x the total bet, and each plaque carries three small markers that fill in as matching tiles turn up. It is the fastest of the three rounds and the one most likely to end on a shrug, but the red tier is a genuine result on a single pick round.
The Risk Game
Endorphina has kept its long running card gamble, and it appears here after any winning spin. You are shown one face up card and four face down, and picking a higher card doubles the win while a lower one wipes it out. The screen tracks which step you are on and you can climb up to ten steps in a row, taking the win at any point. It is the same feature the studio has bolted onto its slots for years and it works exactly as you would expect.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Three separate bonus rounds with three separate meters means there is nearly always something close to triggering
- The free games round can branch into either of the other two bonuses without ending, which very few slots at this price point bother to do
- Hold Beer resets its respin counter on every new cap, so a slow start can still turn into a long round
- The art direction commits properly to the joke, with a crowded bar, a smug reindeer and a neon sign rather than the usual snow and baubles
- A wide stake ladder of 32 levels covers casual play and much larger sessions from the same game
Cons
- High volatility with a quiet base game, so the glasses can sit half full for a very long stretch
- Sources disagree on the maximum win, with 1,000x confirmed by the studio and 1,700x quoted elsewhere, which is not a small gap
- Only the top symbol pay is published outside the game itself, so you cannot compare the rest of the paytable before you load a build
- Thirty fixed lines on a 5 by 3 grid is a conservative frame for a slot this playful
- A Christmas slot built entirely around drinking will not be for everyone, and there is no quieter version of the theme underneath it
Game Screenshot
The base game with a Santa wild landed on reel two. The three labelled glasses sit above the grid, the neon Bad Santa sign glows at the top right, and the toolbar shows 30 fixed lines with the demo running in euros.
Hold Beer Bonus Screenshot
The Hold Beer round in progress, with bottle caps locked across the grid and the MIN, MID, MAX and ULTRA plaques on display. At the 30 euro bet shown here those four plaques work out at 50x, 100x, 300x and 1,000x the stake.
Demo Play
You can try Bad Santa here without staking anything. A few spins in demo mode is the quickest way to see how slowly the three glasses fill and whether the pace suits you, though a demo balance will never tell you how a real session is going to feel.
Game Information
Expert Take
Reception has been warmer than Endorphina’s recent output usually gets, and most of the credit goes to the structure rather than the theme. Running three collection meters at once is a genuinely good idea, and letting the free games round spill into the other two rounds gives the slot a shape that most three bonus games never manage. What people push back on is the base game, thin enough that long stretches of a session amount to paying rent on three meters. The one thing that irritates us is the max win reporting, because a studio that publishes an exact RTP to two decimal places really ought to state its own ceiling plainly rather than leave databases to guess.
Similar Slots to Try
Four picks below, and each one holds on to a single piece of Bad Santa while dropping the rest: the drunken Christmas Eve humour, the bar itself, a well behaved festive alternative, and a set of maths that shares nothing with it at all.
Lucksome sends Santa and Rudolph to the cells on Christmas Eve, so the boozy dark comedy lands in much the same place as Bad Santa, but across 243 ways rather than 30 fixed lines.
Push Gaming’s greedy Santa eats his way across a 5 by 5 grid at 96.45% RTP. A gentler pace than Bad Santa, and the win comes from one growing symbol rather than three separate rounds.
High 5 Games keeps the bar setting without the tinsel. It runs 80 paylines over a 5 by 4 grid at 96.50% RTP, with sticky wilds and doubled wins in place of collection glasses.
Push Gaming again, this time on a 7 by 7 cluster grid where Santa hops between chimneys and stacks a multiplier. Festive like Bad Santa, but the maths could hardly be more different.
About the Developer
Bad Santa comes from Endorphina, a business to business supplier that started in Prague in 2012 and is now registered in Malta as Endorphina Limited under a Malta Gaming Authority licence. It sells games to casino operators and never holds player money itself, which is why you will only ever meet it as a name on a lobby filter. Counting its catalogue is harder than it sounds, because published figures range from around 90 titles certified in a given market to more than 200 released over the studio’s lifetime, and certification differs from one jurisdiction to the next. What is consistent across those years is the house style, a card risk game bolted onto almost everything, a fondness for building an entire slot out of one visual gag, and a willingness to take a theme somewhere slightly uncomfortable. Bad Santa is that instinct applied to Christmas, and the three meter structure is a step up in ambition from the ten line releases the studio made its name on.
Endorphina’s cryptocurrency slot, 96.00% RTP over a 6 by 3 grid and 20 lines. Its pick a prize round is the closest thing in the back catalogue to the Boozy Guns bonus.
A ten line, 96.00% RTP release built around doubled wins and rising multipliers. Small wins land often, which is the opposite of what Bad Santa asks of your balance.
A smoky club theme on 25 lines at 96.00% RTP, with free spins, a risk game and improving symbols. It shows the studio was leaning on bar and nightlife settings long before this one.
Ten lines of emoji faces at 96.00% RTP with shifting wilds and no win respins. Proof that Endorphina will happily build a whole slot around a single visual joke.
Bad Santa Key Stats
Bad Santa slot information last reviewed: July 2026.
| Bad Santa Slot Info | |
|---|---|
| Name: | Bad Santa |
| Provider: | Endorphina |
| Developer Rank: | 11 out of 11 Endorphina games on SlotsLike, the newest of them, and the page that took our Endorphina count from ten to eleven |
| RTP: | 96.04% (operators occasionally run reduced builds, check the info screen before playing) |
| RTP Category: | Medium-High, sitting just above the floor of the 96.00% to 96.49% band |
| RTP Rank: | 1,940 |
| Feature Description: | Three drink meters above the reels trigger three separate rounds: Hold Beer locks bottle caps for resetting respins with four jackpot plaques, Drunk Games awards 26 free games that can branch into the other bonuses, and Boozy Guns is a pick round on a wall of bottles. A ten step card risk game follows any win. Endorphina also lists a Pile Feature, its own name for the token collection that fills the glasses. |
| Feature Categories: | Hold and Win, Free Spins, Pick a Prize Bonus, Gamble Feature, Fixed Jackpots |
| Reels: | 5 |
| Rows: | 3 |
| Paylines: | 30 fixed |
| Volatility: | High |
| Volatility Rank: | High, with almost all of the return held inside the three bonus rounds |
| Min Bet: | £0.30 (listed as 0.30 EUR in the demo we captured) |
| Max Bet: | £150 (listed as 150 EUR in the demo, across 32 stake levels) |
| Max Win: | 1,000x total bet, the ULTRA jackpot in Hold Beer. Some slot databases list 1,700x instead, which the studio does not confirm. |
| Release Date: | December 2025 (launch coverage and databases give dates across the second half of the month) |
| Slotslike Rank: | New listing, not yet ranked out of 4,300+ games (View Top 100) |
Slots with the Same Features
Hold and Win Respins
The Hold Beer round is a straight lock and respin, so anything from the hold and win shelf will feel familiar.
Playson’s longship take on the format, 95.20% RTP across 25 lines, with colossal symbols feeding the respin round instead of bottle caps.
Gameburger Studios collects cash fish into festive pots at 96.00% RTP, with four jackpots sitting on top in the same way Bad Santa stacks four beer jackpots.
Christmas Theme
Two festive alternatives from our Christmas shelf, both far better behaved than this one.
Microgaming spreads 1,024 ways over 5 reels and 4 rows at 96.32% RTP. Free spins and rising multipliers do the work, so it runs far calmer than Bad Santa.
NetEnt puts Santa and his reindeer on opposite sides of a 20 line, 96.35% RTP grid. Bad Santa has them drinking together instead of falling out.
Free Spins Rounds
Drunk Games is a 26 spin round, and these two handle their free spins in very different ways.
Red Tiger’s 20 line festive slot at 95.28% RTP leans on colossal symbols and raining wilds rather than a fixed 26 spin count.
Playson runs 21 paylines at 95.18% RTP with free spins and increasing multipliers, a low key festive option for anyone who finds Bad Santa too spiky.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do the bonus rounds work in Bad Santa?
Three glasses sit on the bar above the reels, one for each bonus. The lager glass fills toward the Hold Beer round, the ale glass toward Drunk Games and the stout glass toward Boozy Guns. Hold Beer is a lock and respin round on a 5 by 3 grid of bottle caps with three respins that reset every time a new cap lands. Drunk Games awards 26 free games that can retrigger or drop you into one of the other two rounds. Boozy Guns is a pick round where you shoot bottles until three matching prizes appear.
What is the RTP of Bad Santa?
Endorphina publishes 96.04%, and every source we checked agreed on that figure. Operators sometimes run reduced builds of a supplier’s games, so it is still worth opening the info screen at your casino and confirming the number before you stake anything.
What is the maximum win on Bad Santa?
This is where sources split. Endorphina’s own material and the launch coverage put the ceiling at the ULTRA jackpot of 1,000x the total bet, awarded for filling all 15 positions in the Hold Beer round. Slot databases list a higher 1,700x figure, which appears to combine feature wins rather than a single award. Treat 1,000x as the confirmed jackpot and anything above it as unverified.
Is Bad Santa a high volatility slot?
Yes. Endorphina rates it high, and the design backs that up, because the base game pays modestly and almost all of the value sits inside the three bonus rounds. Expect the glasses to fill slowly and plan a session budget that can survive the wait.
What are the best slots like Bad Santa?
Saint Nicked is the nearest match in tone, since Lucksome built it around the same boozy Christmas Eve idea. Beer Barrel Bash keeps the bar setting without the festive wrapping, Fat Santa offers a lighter Christmas alternative, and Vikings Fortune Hold And Win covers the lock and respin side of the maths.
Can I play Bad Santa for free?
Yes. Endorphina runs a demo of Bad Santa on its own site, and most casinos that carry the game offer a free play mode alongside the real money version. A demo will show you how slowly the three glasses fill, which is the single most useful thing to know before you commit a bankroll.
Who makes Bad Santa?
Endorphina, a supplier founded in Prague in 2012 and now registered in Malta as Endorphina Limited. It holds a Malta Gaming Authority business to business licence and supplies slots to casino operators rather than running a casino of its own.
When was Bad Santa released?
December 2025. The exact day is reported inconsistently, with launch coverage and slot databases listing dates spread across the second half of that month, so the safest answer is simply that it arrived in time for Christmas 2025.
Our Verdict on Bad Santa
Bad Santa is the rare Christmas slot with a proper idea behind it. Three meters filling at three different speeds gives the session something to watch even when the reels are doing nothing, and the free games round spilling into the other two bonuses is the kind of touch that usually turns up in far more expensive releases. Against that, the base game is thin, the volatility is unforgiving, and the studio has been careless about stating its own maximum win. If the bar setting appeals and you have the patience for the wait, it earns its place in the December rotation. If you want a festive slot that pays little and often, look at Secret Santa or Merry Christmas instead.
SlotsLike rating: 7.4/10