Badger Miners

Badgers are famous for building dams and stuff, but who knew they were just as skilled at burrowing underground and extracting the earth’s precious minerals? At least, they are, according to developer Yggdrasil Gaming, as evidenced by the studio’s online slot Badger Miners. In Badger Miners, players join a couple of industrious badgers as they tunnel into the earth, making use of features like free spins, Wild Respins, multipliers and a buy feature in an attempt to pull some rich stuff from the ground.

Taking into consideration the fact online gambling is an adult activity, it’s amazing when you consider how many cute-as-a-button online slots there are. Badger Miners is one of these cute-as-a-button slots, largely due to the cheerful wee badger characters tapping away at rocks with a pick or tinkering with a tool. Being a mining slot, play takes place beneath ground level, though not somewhere super deep. The above-ground part of the planet can be seen in the top portion of the screen, covered in dirt, a felled tree and a row of other greenery. Dotted amongst the rocks on either side of the active gaming panel, multi-coloured gemstones can be seen; perhaps players will get their hands on some?

To do so, they will have to pick a stake first, and the options vary from 20 p/c to £/€50 per spin. Otherwise, players can buy the bonus round instead if they would rather avoid breaking rocks in the base game. A highly volatile gambling machine, Badger Miners comes with a default return to player value of 96%, though three lower return values are available as well, so that’s something to be on the lookout for.

Sunk just beneath the earth is Badger Miners’ 5-reel, 3-row gaming grid where 243 ways to win are provided. With a hit rate of around 1 in 4, wins are made when matching symbols land left to right from the leftmost reel onwards. The low pays in Badger Miners are blue, turquoise, green, yellow, orange, and red gems paying 6 to 8 times the bet for 5-of-a-kind, then a food container/flask, a shovel, a pick, and 2 badger character symbols as the higher value lot – these symbols pay 12 to 50 times the bet for 5-of-kind.

Badger Miners: Slot Features

Down here amongst the gems and the badgers, players come across features such as Cash Wilds, Wilds Respins, free spins, a bonus buy, plus Multipliers and Operators.

Multipliers and Operators

There are multipliers above the middle three reels, and operators can appear in between. Multipliers are selected at random, and the operators + or * may appear between them. Then, from right to left, the equation produces a multiplier value. For example, 4x + 2x on reels 2 and 3 gives a 6x multiplier on both reels.

Cash Wilds & Wilds Respins

Cash Wilds can land on the middle three reels. Cash Wilds substitute for regular pay symbols and collect the win amounts of the wins the wilds were part of. Next, what happens is a respin is triggered where Cash Wilds move up one position. During respins, multipliers (covered below) stay the same, and they end when no Cash Wilds are involved in a win.

Free Spins

Collecting 5 scatter symbols in the base game awards 7 free spins. Each extra scatter awards an additional 2 free spins. Free spins play out the same as the base game, with a couple of rule changes. Wilds that have not reached the top position of the reels over respins remain with the collected win value for the following spin. Also, scatter symbols do not land in free spins. Free spins have odds of triggering of 1 in 300 spins on average, but players may buy them for 95 times the bet.

Badger Miners: Slot Verdict

The mining slot category is one that’s been around for a long while and one which is bound to be around for a long while more. However, this might be the first time badgers have been thrust underground to pull out the rich stuff. Usually, players are gambling alongside grizzled prospectors who look like one of Santa Claus’ relatives. Change is as good as a holiday, so they say, so a refreshingly new take on slot mining was appreciated going into the review. Badgers, though, not sure if it works, as in, maybe they’re going to feel a little out of place for players in the mood for a mining slot which sticks closer to tradition. If a cute mining slot is what you’re after, though, then Badger Miners could be worth a deeper inspection.

As part of a deeper inspection, when the charm wore off, Badger Miners was a bit average, to be honest, and visually it kind of comes across as an Yggdrasil B-team production. It has a few interesting ideas, like the Multiplier/Operator feature and Wild Respins, but they just didn’t seem to do much. Badger Miners has a lot of bright lights and moving parts, yet it seemed hard to align them and generate something interesting. The session turned into masses of Wild Respins respinning to nowhere, multipliers screaming out for operators, and badgers who could have put as much effort into being productive as they do in being cute.

No doubt, good things can happen in this badger hole when everything lines up; the game does have a max win of 10,000x the bet and all. When it doesn’t, though, Badger Miners might be pretty tedious. Kudos are due to Yggdrasil Gaming for throwing off the shackles of tradition to design a mining-themed slot, and there are innovative ideas to unearth. So, while Badger Miners might not be the acme of mining-themed gambling, it’s got something to offer mining enthusiasts looking for an underground game that diverges from the norm.