Slots Like Bison Bonanza: Four Bonus Modes and a x500 Multiplier Ceiling
Bison Bonanza is Blueprint Gaming’s canyon-set scatter pays slot, released on 21 April 2022 with a published RTP of 96.50% and a 6×5 grid. There are no paylines. Eight or more matching symbols anywhere on the board pay, the winners are cleared, and fresh symbols cascade down into the gaps until nothing else connects. Bison, bear, wolf, eagle and lynx portraits are the premiums, four gem-cut card suits fill in behind them, and gold bison coins are the bonus symbols you are really waiting on. Four of those open a choice of free spins modes: twelve spins carrying x2 to x100 multipliers, eight spins at x4 to x200, five spins at x8 to x500, or a mystery pick that decides for you. Stakes start at 20p and run to £100 on the widest builds, volatility is high at four out of five on Blueprint’s own scale, and the ceiling is 10,000x your stake. If you are hunting slots like Bison Bonanza, what you are usually after is that exact trade: a flat, grinding base game in exchange for a bonus you get to shape yourself.
Where to Play
18+ only. T&Cs apply. Please gamble responsibly.
How the Game Works
Reviewed by Brian TaylorPublished: July 2026.
Some operator links on this page earn us a commission when a reader signs up. That arrangement has no bearing on the score, the figures or the criticisms below. Play only if you are 18 or over, decide your limit before you start, and walk away when it stops being fun.
The board is six reels wide and five symbols deep, framed by a pair of bull horns and set against a red canyon wall. Wins are counted by quantity rather than position. Land eight of the same symbol anywhere on those thirty spaces and you are paid, whether they sit in a neat block or scattered across all six reels. Every win then clears and the empty positions refill from above, which means a single paid spin can resolve two or three times before the reels settle. Blueprint has not attached a rising multiplier to that chain, so a long cascade in the base game is worth exactly the sum of its parts.
That decision shapes everything about how the game feels. Base spins are busy but shallow. You will see symbols vanish regularly, you will collect a lot of returns worth a fraction of the stake, and your balance will drift down at a fairly steady rate while nothing dramatic happens. The premiums simply do not pay enough for eight or nine of them to change a session. What you are being paid for during those stretches is patience, because all the value in the maths model has been pushed into the bonus.
Blueprint gives you two ways to shorten the wait. Bison Bet adds 25% to the cost of every spin and doubles the frequency of bonus triggers, leaving the theoretical return untouched. Where local rules allow it, you can also skip the wait entirely with a purchase. Neither changes the fundamental deal on offer here, which is that the free spins round is the game and the paid spins are the queue.
Symbols and Paytable
Five animal portraits sit at the top of the table: the bison, the bear, the wolf, the eagle and the lynx, in roughly that order of value. Below them are four gem-cut card suits in green, purple, pink and blue, which pay very little and exist mainly to keep the cascades moving. Published paytable breakdowns put eight or nine of a premium at somewhere between 1x and 10x the stake, rising to between 10x and 50x once you have twelve or more on screen. The suits are far humbler, starting at around a quarter of your stake for eight and reaching a few times the stake for a full board.
Two other symbols matter more than any of those. The gold bison coin is the bonus symbol, and four or more anywhere on the grid opens the choice screen. Inside the free spins, gold multiplier symbols land carrying values within whichever range you selected, and when several appear on the same cascade their values are added together before being applied to the win. That addition is why the five-spin mode with an x8 floor is the mode most experienced players reach for. Three multipliers in one drop at x8, x12 and x30 is a x50 hit on a modest cascade, and that is the arithmetic the 10,000x ceiling depends on.
Bonus Features Explained
The Free Spins Choice
Land four or more bonus coins and the game pauses on a selection screen instead of dropping you straight into the round. Twelve spins carry multipliers between x2 and x100. Eight spins raise the floor to x4 and the ceiling to x200. Five spins take you to x8 and x500. The fourth option hands the decision to the game and drops you into one of the three at random. There is no correct answer, only a preference: more spins mean more chances at a cascade, fewer spins mean every multiplier that lands is worth more. Anyone chasing the published maximum is taking five spins every time, and most of those rounds will end with very little to show for it.
Cascades and How They Pay
The tumble mechanic runs in both the base game and the bonus, and it works the same way in each. Winning symbols are removed, everything above drops down, new symbols fill the gaps, and the board is evaluated again. The difference in free spins is that multiplier symbols can join the board during those refills, so a chain that started as an eight-symbol pay on the gems can end up carrying a combined multiplier by the time it finishes resolving. Wins are settled at the end of the sequence rather than step by step, which is worth knowing if you are watching the counter and wondering why it has not moved yet.
Bison Bet
The toggle on the left of the reels raises your stake by a quarter and doubles the likelihood of the bonus triggering. Blueprint is explicit that the RTP is identical with it switched on or off, which makes this a straightforward trade of session length for bonus frequency. It suits players who find the base game tedious and can afford the faster burn. It is a poor idea on a short bankroll, since a 25% surcharge on every spin eats through a deposit noticeably faster than most players expect.
Buying In, and the Bison Wheel
Two purchases exist where the operator and the local regulator permit them. The standard buy costs 100x your stake and gives you the same entry that four bonus coins would have. The Bison Wheel costs 248x and is the more interesting one, because it does not simply hand you a preset round. It spins a three-ring wheel that sets the spin count somewhere between ten and twenty, the minimum multiplier between x2 and x10, and the maximum between x100 and x500, so you might come out with twenty spins on a low floor or a shorter round with far heavier multipliers attached. Odd though it sounds, the wheel entry carries the highest theoretical return on the game at 96.82%. UK-licensed sites do not offer feature buys at all, so British players will only ever see these options abroad.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Being able to choose your own multiplier range instead of accepting whatever the studio picked is genuinely rare, and it makes two bonus entries feel different.
- 96.50% is a good headline return for a 2022 release, and the buy configurations improve on it rather than eroding it.
- Multiplier values add together on a cascade, so the top end is reachable in one round rather than needing a freak sequence.
- Bison Bet is honestly presented as a variance dial with no change to the return, which is more transparency than most ante bets offer.
- The artwork holds up well on a phone, and the horned frame keeps all six reels readable without shrinking the symbols.
Cons
- The base game has no multiplier on its cascades, so paid spins are flat and repetitive between bonus entries.
- Four bonus symbols is a demanding trigger, and without Bison Bet the wait can be punishing.
- It is a very close reading of Sweet Bonanza’s design, down to the grid size and the eight-symbol pay rule.
- The five-spin mode that everyone reaches for ends with nothing more often than not.
- Sources disagree on the top stake, which makes it hard to know what your casino will actually let you bet before you load it.
Game Screenshot
The top of the board during paid spins. Two bison portraits are stacked on the first reel, with wolf and eagle heads and green, purple and pink gem suits filling the rows beneath the horned frame. The panel on the left carries the Bonus Buy button and the Bison Bet toggle, which is reading 2.50. The stake and balance readouts fall outside this crop.
Inside a Free Spins Round
A bonus round in progress. The panel on the left is headed Multipliers and reads x4 above x500, the counter on the right shows spin 6 of 18, and a large gold x20 multiplier symbol has landed across the middle of the grid. Five bear portraits sit across reels three, four and five, with a lynx beneath the x20, two wolf heads on the last reel and gem card suits in green, purple, pink and blue around them.
Demo Play
The game is embedded below and runs on play money, so you can watch a few cascades and try each bonus mode without staking anything. It is the quickest way to work out whether the flat base game will bore you before you commit real money to finding out.
Game Information
Expert Take
Reception was warm without being excited. The most detailed review of the game scored it eight out of ten and made the fair criticism that it borrows heavily from Sweet Bonanza, which is difficult to argue with when the grid size, the eight-symbol rule and the tumble behaviour all line up. What reviewers consistently praised was the execution. The bonus choice screen adds something the game it was modelled on does not have, and putting the highest theoretical return behind the wheel purchase rather than the cheapest entry is a design decision that rewards players who read the numbers. The complaint that keeps coming back is the base game, and it is a legitimate one. Blueprint chose not to give paid spins a multiplier trail, and the result is a game that only really starts once the bonus does.
Similar Slots to Try
The game Blueprint was clearly answering. Same eight-symbol scatter pays idea on a 6×5 board, but the multipliers arrive as bombs during the spins rather than being chosen up front.
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Tumbling stone symbols and a grid that grows as the cascade runs. A gentler top end than the canyon, but the chain reactions last longer.
A quieter herd slot for anyone who likes the setting but finds four bonus modes and a wheel buy too much machinery to think about.
About the Developer
Blueprint Gaming works out of Newark in Nottinghamshire and has been wholly owned by the German Merkur Group since 2012, which is a longer stretch of stability than most studios in this industry manage. For years the reputation rested on licensed brands and pub-style cabinets, and plenty of the catalogue still reads that way. Bison Bonanza belongs to a different strand of the business, the one where Blueprint watches what is selling elsewhere and builds its own version with a twist bolted on. Here the twist is the choice screen, and it is a good one, because it gives the player a decision to make in a genre that usually offers none. The studio holds a UK Gambling Commission remote software licence and routinely ships titles in more than one RTP configuration, so two casinos can offer the same game at different returns without either of them doing anything wrong. Our full list of the studio’s titles sits on the Blueprint Gaming page.
The loud end of the Blueprint range. Where the canyon keeps its features inside the bonus, this one throws modifiers at you constantly during paid spins.
Blueprint doing wish-granting modifiers on Megaways reels. A useful contrast, because the studio hands you the randomness here instead of letting you choose it.
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Bison Bonanza Key Stats
Bison Bonanza slot information last reviewed: July 2026
| Bison Bonanza Slot Info | |
|---|---|
| Name | Bison Bonanza |
| Provider | Blueprint Gaming (Merkur Group) |
| Developer Rank | Our estimate: 4th of the 154 Blueprint Gaming titles in our ranked order, and one of the twenty-two titles given a card on the Blueprint Gaming hub. A 96.50% return, a 10,000x ceiling and one of the studio’s most-played modern releases put it in the top tier, behind the Fishin Frenzy line that carries the catalogue. |
| RTP | 96.50% on the standard build. The bonus buy configuration is recorded at 96.60% and the Bison Wheel purchase at 96.82%, and Blueprint supplies reduced configurations to some operators, so check the game information screen before playing. |
| RTP Category | High, inside our 96.50% to 96.99% band. At exactly 96.50% it sits on the very bottom edge of that band, one hundredth of a percent above the Medium-High tier. |
| RTP Rank | Upper third of the directory. It beats the industry average for its release year and comfortably beats Blueprint’s own catalogue average, which is dragged down by a long tail of 92% to 95% cabinet conversions. |
| Feature Description | Scatter pays on a 6×5 grid with cascading refills, a four-way choice of free spins modes carrying additive multipliers up to x500, a Bison Bet trigger booster and two purchase options including a wheel that randomises the round. |
| Feature Categories | Free Spins, Cascading Wins, Buy Bonus |
| Reels | 6 |
| Rows | 5 |
| Paylines | None. Scatter pays, with eight or more matching symbols anywhere on the grid forming a win |
| Volatility | High. Blueprint rates it 4 out of 5 on its own scale |
| Volatility Rank | Upper third for variance. Frequent tiny cascade wins disguise a distribution where nearly all the value sits inside a bonus round that needs four coins to open. |
| Min Bet | £0.20 |
| Max Bet | £100 on the widest builds. One review records a £10 ceiling instead, and individual operators cap lower again, so treat the slider in your own casino as the answer. |
| Max Win | 10,000x stake. One database adds that the payout is capped at £1,000,000 |
| Release Date | 21 April 2022 |
| Slotslike Rank | New listing, not yet ranked among our 4,300+ games (View Top 100) |
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Frequently Asked Questions
How do the free spins work in Bison Bonanza?
Four or more gold bison bonus symbols anywhere on the grid open a choice screen rather than starting the round straight away. You can take twelve spins with multipliers running from x2 up to x100, eight spins with x4 to x200, or five spins with x8 up to x500. A fourth option leaves the pick to the game and lands you on one of the three at random. During the round the multiplier symbols that drop are added together before they are applied, so the appeal of the five-spin mode is that the floor on every one of those multipliers is already x8.
What is the RTP of Bison Bonanza?
The published figure is 96.50%. Buying the standard bonus nudges the theoretical return to 96.60%, and buying the Bison Wheel entry takes it to 96.82%, which is unusual because most studios lower the return on a purchase rather than raise it. Blueprint ships a lot of its catalogue in more than one configuration, so the number in your casino’s game information screen is the only one that counts for the build you are spinning.
What is the maximum win on Bison Bonanza?
10,000 times your stake. Every source we checked agrees on that figure, and one database adds that the payout is capped at one million pounds, which only matters if you are staking near the top of the slider. Reaching the ceiling means stacking enough multiplier symbols inside a free spins round to land on a very large cascade, so it is a bonus-round outcome rather than something the base game can produce.
How volatile is Bison Bonanza?
High. Blueprint rates it four out of five on its own scale, and the shape of play backs that up. Scatter pays games hand you frequent small returns that clip away at the stake while you wait, and almost everything worth having sits behind a bonus round that needs four bonus symbols. Expect a flat, grinding base game and plan your session length accordingly.
What are the best slots like Bison Bonanza?
Start with Sweet Bonanza, which uses the same eight-symbol scatter pays maths on the same 6×5 board and is the clear reference point for this design. Buffalo Rising Megaways keeps the herd and the canyon but swaps the fixed grid for shifting Megaways reels, Aztec Bonanza gives you longer cascades at a lower ceiling, and Bison Valley covers the theme without the four-mode bonus menu.
Can I play Bison Bonanza free in a demo?
Yes. The demo further up this page runs on play money and behaves the same way on the reels as the real build, including the cascades, the bonus choice screen and the multiplier maths. The one thing worth remembering is that a free session tells you nothing useful about long-run return, because 96.50% is a figure that emerges over millions of spins rather than the hundred you might play in a demo.
Who makes Bison Bonanza?
Blueprint Gaming, the Newark studio that has belonged to the German Merkur Group since 2012. It was released on 21 April 2022 and sits alongside the studio’s other North American wildlife titles rather than in any of its licensed brand series.
What is the Bison Bet, and is it worth using?
Bison Bet raises the cost of each spin by 25% and doubles your chance of triggering the bonus. Blueprint states that the theoretical return does not change when it is switched on, so it is a variance dial rather than a value decision. If the base game is boring you and the bonus is the only part you care about, it does what you want. If your bankroll is tight, paying a quarter more per spin shortens your session by roughly the same proportion.
Our Verdict on Bison Bonanza
Bison Bonanza is a well-built copy of somebody else’s idea with one genuinely good addition. The scatter pays engine is nothing you have not seen, the cascades do not multiply, and the base game is as flat as any in the genre, which means a session lives or dies on how often you reach the bonus. What lifts it is the choice screen. Deciding for yourself whether to take twelve cheap spins or five expensive ones is a small piece of agency, but it is more than almost any of its rivals offer, and it changes how you think about a trigger rather than just how you watch it. Add a 96.50% return that holds up against the 2022 field, a wheel purchase that quietly carries the best odds in the game, and an honest ante bet that does not skim the RTP, and there is more care in this design than the borrowed skeleton suggests. Go in expecting a long queue for a short, sharp payoff, and it is one of the better canyon slots on the shelf.
SlotsLike rating: 7.5/10