In December 2020, Pragmatic Play released Big Bass Bonanza, a five-reel slot made in partnership with Reel Kingdom and starring a fisherman who hauls cash prizes off the reels. The studio’s early releases called what came next the Big Bass Bonanza series, and later ones shortened the name to Big Bass. The franchise has since passed two dozen slots and spread into other kinds of games.
Most of those games run on the same loop. What separates the titles is everything around it: where the cash prizes pay, how large they can grow and which buttons sit beside the reels. Some of those buttons also fall under regulation, and Alberta’s rules cover several of them.
The loop under every title
Each Big Bass slot is two games on one set of reels. In the base game, a fish is just another line symbol, paying for a run of three to five like most symbols. PlayAlberta’s rules for the original game say the cash prize printed on each fish can only be activated in free spins, so a screen crowded with fish can pay nothing if they fall outside a winning line.
Three or more scatters start the free spins, and the fisherman joins the reels as a wild. Each time he lands, he collects the prize on every fish in view at that moment. Every fisherman also adds a step to a meter, and each fourth step brings 10 more spins plus a higher multiplier on fish prizes. The same rules add a detail the headline figures leave out: each new multiplier applies only to the block of 10 spins that comes with it.
The meter usually has an end. On PlayAlberta’s page for Big Bass Vegas Double Down Deluxe, the collection stops once a round reaches 60 free spins in total, and on its Big Bass Reel Repeat page it ends after 30 extra spins. Many titles also carry a rescue for a half-made catch: when a fisherman lands with no fish in view, a bazooka or a similar random feature may add some, and when fish land without him, a hook may drop a fisherman onto the reels.
Six years of sequels
Pragmatic keeps its own count. Its newsroom called Big Bass Splash the fifth instalment in 2022 and Big Bass Hold & Spinner Megaways the tenth title in August 2023. Three months later it named Big Bass Christmas Bash the twelfth, by which point it was describing Big Bass as its longest-running series. The output didn’t slow: the newsroom announced at least seven more Big Bass slots during 2024.
Many entries change little beyond the setting. Santa took the fisherman’s seat in Christmas Big Bass Bonanza, and Big Bass Day at the Races, which Pragmatic said offered familiar gameplay, moved him to a racecourse in time for the 2024 Cheltenham Festival. The table follows the titles that changed how the game pays out, which is the more useful way to tell the series apart.
|
Title |
Released |
Where the cash prizes pay |
What else it added |
|
Big Bass Bonanza |
December 2020 |
Free spins only |
The template: a fisherman wild collects fish prizes and fills a retrigger meter |
|
Big Bass Splash |
June 2022 |
Free spins only |
A nudge and respin, or a hook, when only two scatters land |
|
Big Bass Hold & Spinner |
March 2023 |
Free spins, plus a coin respin bonus |
A second bonus game, started by three coins in the base game |
|
Big Bass Amazon Xtreme |
June 2023 |
Base game too, at random, with a multiplier of up to 40x |
Player-picked free-spins modifiers and an ante option of up to 15 times the bet |
|
Big Bass Hold & Spinner Megaways |
August 2023 |
Free spins, plus a coin respin bonus |
Six reels, 147,456 paylines and unlimited retriggers |
|
Big Bass Floats My Boat |
February 2024 |
Base game too, through a random net with multipliers of up to 50x |
A sticky multiplier on every position during free spins |
|
Big Bass Secrets of the Golden Lake |
April 2024 |
Free spins, in either of two rounds |
A 12-card pick; two of the cards open a round where only fish and fishermen land |
|
Big Bass Mission Fishin’ |
June 2024 |
Free spins, or a coin game the player chooses instead |
Stack the Cash, where robot crabs collect reels filled with fish coins |
|
Big Bass Reel Repeat |
August 2025 |
Free spins only |
A paid chance to replay the free spins when they end |
|
Big Bass Splash 1000 |
December 2025 |
Free spins only |
Fish worth up to 1,000x and a 25,000x cap on total wins |
The later titles also sell shortcuts. Ante bets raise the stake for a better chance of free spins, and Amazon Xtreme already had one in 2023. Pragmatic’s releases for Big Bass Vegas Double Down Deluxe, Big Bass Bonanza 1000 and Reel Repeat describe bonus buys offered “in select markets”, without listing the markets. In Canada, the answer starts with the province.
What changes on an Alberta site
Alberta’s answer sits in two places. One is the internet gaming standards of AGLC, the province’s regulator, which apply to every operator and supplier on its register. The other is PlayAlberta, the government-run site, which has game pages for eight Big Bass titles.
The standards don’t mention buying the bonus, and PlayAlberta’s own how-to-play pages describe buy options on several Big Bass titles. Buy Free Spins costs 100 times the bet on Big Bass Splash, the stake of 100 ordinary spins in one go, and plays one spin that is guaranteed to trigger the round. Super Free Spins on Splash 1000 costs 450 times, and Mega Free Spins on Reel Repeat, which starts the round with all three of its modifiers, costs 1,250 times. The same pages describe ante bets that add 50 per cent or more to each spin while switched on, with prizes still worked out on the base bet.
The standards do rule out two kinds of button. A slot can’t offer autoplay, so every game starts with its own press of the button, and games must start at least 2.5 seconds apart. Nor can a slot offer anything that shortens the time to a result, a rule the standards illustrate with slam stop, quick spin and turbo.
That rule carries a note: it does not apply to bonus or feature games where no additional stake is wagered. Free spins won in the base game appear to fit that description, and the fisherman’s round needs no button anyway. PlayAlberta’s rules for the original game say free spins play automatically, at the bet of the spin that triggered them.
On a registered site, then, a Big Bass game runs without autoplay or turbo. BonusFinder Canada has a page on best online casinos alberta covering the province’s regulated market, which has admitted players 18 and older since July 13, 2026. The page includes sections on payment methods and popular games.
Volatility, as the studio tells it
Pragmatic’s game pages for the series list a return figure and a feature summary, with no volatility rating. The word is rare in its launch announcements, too: in November 2021, chief executive Julian Jarvis said the Megaways edition brought “high-volatility excitement” to the series. The studio’s plainest description came without the word, in its 2021 release for Bigger Bass Bonanza, which said the big wins come in the free spins feature and the lower-value ones through regular line wins.
The word does turn up on PlayAlberta. Its page for Big Bass Secrets of the Golden Lake calls the Golden Lake round “a more volatile version of Free Spins”, with higher starting values on the fish.
GameSense, the responsible gambling program AGLC runs in the province, sets out the trade-off on its page about odds and hit frequency. It defines hit frequency as how often a slot machine has a winning outcome, puts the range at 3 to 40 per cent and says machines with smaller hit frequencies tend to offer larger jackpots. A Big Bass game makes that trade in its own way, holding its largest prizes behind a bonus round that has to be triggered first.
The top prizes have grown over the years. Pragmatic quoted a 10,000x top win for Keeping It Reel in 2022, and chief operating officer Irina Cornides called the 10,000x on Hold & Spinner in 2023 “one of the biggest in the series”. Splash 1000 put its cap at 25,000 times the bet late in 2025, and PlayAlberta’s page for it says the free spins end automatically once total wins reach that figure. The two titles in the table that pay fish in the base game spread some of the catch the other way, onto ordinary spins.
No bonus round is ever due. GameSense’s page is blunt that random results are never influenced by past events, so a long run without free spins doesn’t bring the next round any closer. For anyone who finds the wait turning into a chase, Alberta’s Addiction Helpline runs 24/7 at 1-866-332-2322 and takes calls about gambling.
Off the reels and into the shops
The fisherman left the slot format in 2023 with Big Bass Crash, a crash game in which players stake before each round and try to cash out before the fishing line snaps, with an option to bank half a win and leave the other half in play. Big Bass Bingo followed early in 2025, a 30-ball game where players daub fish instead of balls, and Pragmatic said the range then spanned slots, crash games and bingo.
Shops came next. In November 2025, Entain agreed to bring Big Bass Bonanza, Big Bass Splash, Big Bass Hold & Spinner and more of the series to over 2,700 Ladbrokes and Coral shops in the UK, with exclusive bookmaker rights, and the announcement called it the first time the series would reach a major operator’s retail network. Entain also said Big Bass Splash, out since 2022, was its top-performing online slot in the UK that year. Rank Group’s Mecca Bingo got a title of its own in June 2026, Mecca Big Bass Double Dab, made for that brand alone.
Big online games often grow another way. WhiteMagz’s guide to World of Warcraft’s Midnight Patch 12.1.5 walks through a single-boss raid, a nine-chamber, dungeon-style Labyrinth and an hourly world event that one update adds to a game people already play, and Blizzard scheduled that update for October 13.
Slots on regulated sites change on different terms. In Alberta, a change to game design that could affect compliance with AGLC’s standards has to be certified before it is deployed, while changes unrelated to compliance, such as cosmetic ones, can rely on the previous certificate.
Pragmatic has shipped its new ideas for the fisherman as new games with their own names. Big Bass Vegas 1000 arrived on September 24, 2026, almost six years after the first, and the studio’s games page lists Big Bass Halloween Splash 1000 for October 12.