Day 31 - Art House - Slot Review

On day 31, I took on Art House by Fuzey Studios, a slot where the symbols are famous paintings hanging on a gallery wall. It’s a 6x4 grid game with a 96.70% RTP, high volatility and a 20,000x max multiplier potential, released this year.

There are no paylines here. You win by matching 5 or more of the same symbol next to each other, either horizontally or vertically. The winning symbols disappear, new ones drop in from above, and the tumbles continue until there are no new wins. The paintings are the high paying symbols, with the Mona Lisa on top, followed by The Great Wave, The Scream, The Starry Night and Girl with a Pearl Earring. A, K, Q, J and 10 are the low paying ones. The Wild replaces any regular symbol to join groups together, but it never pays on its own and never counts toward the Auction.

The signature feature is the Auction. When an Auction symbol lands, every painting on the board gets tagged, and any new painting that drops in during the tumbles is collected too. Once the board settles, the auction begins and every collected painting turns into a spinning wheel of prize values. The auctioneer strikes the hammer, and everything on the wheels is paid to you together. The more paintings you collect, the bigger the sale, so a long run of tumbles builds a bigger prize. If two or more Auction symbols land on the same spin, they share one sale, and the extra ones don’t make it any bigger.

Landing 3 FS Scatters triggers the Bonus, 4 trigger the Super Bonus and 5 or more trigger the rare Hidden Bonus. Scatters pay from anywhere on the board.

Bonus: 10 free spins at a 1x global multiplier. Every 3 Auction symbols you collect gives you +10 free spins and a better multiplier: 2x, then 3x, then 10x. Super Bonus: the same track with half the climbing. Every 2 Auction symbols gives you a tier, so you reach 2x, 3x and 10x much faster. Hidden Bonus: no track at all. You start with 15 free spins and the full 10x multiplier already running on every win.

In the free spins, the sale is multiplied by the global multiplier too, so an auction at 10x is worth ten times as much. Once you reach 10x, the track is complete and every further auction pays at the full 10x. Landing 3 or more Scatters during any bonus gives you 5 extra spins.

The plan for winning is to get a lot of paintings on the board before an Auction lands, and in the bonus to collect Auction symbols as fast as you can until you reach the 10x multiplier. I never managed to get there.

During my 1000 spins, I triggered the regular Bonus 12 times, but never the Super Bonus or the Hidden Bonus. There were lots of re-triggers inside the bonus rounds, so some of them took quite a while, but I still couldn’t reach the 10x level, where the game starts paying the juicy spins.

It was a losing session, but there were decent base game wins along the way, from 50x up to 90x, and my biggest hit was 107x. Because the bonuses came so often, I didn’t lose big.

I liked the game overall, but two things could be better. In the Bonus, 3 Auction symbols re-trigger 10 more spins and a better multiplier, but the progress bar makes it feel like you need 4. It’s a bit confusing visually, even though the rules explain clearly how many you need. And when you land FS Scatters during the bonus, you get extra spins, but it only adds to the remaining spins counter. That moment deserves a bigger celebration to get the player excited.

The game is clearly built around the bonus round. If you like Pragmatic Play’s Big Bass series, this is a very good take on that bonus mechanic, with a bit of a twist.

1000 Spins APPROVED!