3 Blazing Scarabs

3 Blazing Scarabs Overview

3 Blazing Scarabs is a Kalamba Games hold-and-win slot on a five-by-three grid with 20 paylines, and the three in the title is a count of features rather than reels. Three named mechanics run across the top of the screen on their own plates: TREASURE, COLLECT and DOUBLE UP.

How many of them are active is the thing the buy menu sells, and the pricing makes the hierarchy explicit.

Theme and Graphics

The base game looks down a torchlit temple corridor – carved columns receding into blue shadow, palms crowding the entrance, hieroglyphs cut into the stone. Trigger the feature and the scene opens out onto a ruined city at sunset, orange sky over sandstone towers.

The three feature plates sit above the reels like cartouches, each with its own coloured gem: red for TREASURE, blue for COLLECT, green for DOUBLE UP. Down the left runs a ladder of prize values on pink plates, with a scarab medallion beneath it carrying the largest figure of all.

The symbols are a pharaoh’s gold mask, a red-ribboned ankh, a crook and flail in green, and a blue scarab gem, with card royals filling the rest. Wilds arrive as painted drums marked WILD. All figures below come from demo play at a 100.00 bet.

Twenty Lines and What They Pay

The paytable runs to two pages, and the first gives the four high symbols. The pharaoh mask leads at 5,000.00 for five, 2,500.00 for four and 500.00 for three – that is 50x, 25x and 5x the bet.

The ankh follows at 1,000.00 / 500.00 / 300.00, the crook and flail at 800.00 / 400.00 / 200.00, and the blue scarab at 500.00 / 300.00 / 100.00. Below them sit the royals.

Note the pharaoh’s own ladder. Four of a kind pays half what five pays, but three of a kind pays only a tenth of the four-symbol prize. The drop from four to three is where the table falls away, and it falls a long way.

The demo’s base-game results sit at the ordinary end of that: 100.00, 340.00 and 400.00 against a 100.00 stake – one of them exactly the bet back. The exception is a spin carrying two wilds alongside the pharaohs on the top row, which paid 5,080.00, or just over fifty times the bet.

The Hold and Win Round

The feature clears the reels to fifteen grey scarab outlines with a SPINS LEFT counter beneath them, and coins land on the positions carrying cash values.

One completed board in the demo reads 200.00, 50.00, 2,000.00, 2,600.00, 300.00, 100.00 and 500.00 across its filled positions – a total of 5,750.00, or 57.5 times the stake.

The spread within that single board is the detail worth noticing. The cheapest coin on it is worth 0.5x the bet; the dearest is worth 26x. One coin is therefore worth fifty-two times another sitting two positions away, and a board that looks well filled can still be worth very little if the numbers on it are small.

For scale: that 26x coin on its own is worth more than half of what five pharaoh masks pay across a full payline.

The counter runs down from three, resetting each time a new coin lands, and the demo catches a board at three spins remaining and the same board at zero – two coins heavier by the end. On fifteen positions that is a round with room to grow but a firm ceiling on how far.

Treasure, Collect and Double Up

The three plates above the reels are the game’s own mechanics, and the demo catches two of them arriving as symbols on the grid. A blue scarab marked COLLECT lands on the middle row; a green one marked DOUBLE UP lands lower down, with orange coin scarabs reading 100.00 and 80.00 beside them.

Their names describe them. Collect gathers the values on the board into one prize; Double Up multiplies what has been gathered. Applied to the 5,750.00 board above, a single Double Up would turn it into 11,500.00 – 115 times the stake – without a single extra coin landing.

That is why the buy menu prices by how many features are active rather than by how many spins you get. On this game the features are worth more than the coins.

The Buy Menu: Paying for Features, Not Spins

The BuyBonus panel offers three options, and each names both a guarantee and a starting number of hold-and-win symbols:

1 active feature guaranteed – 3 hold and win symbols – 4,500.00.
2 active features guaranteed – 4 hold and win symbols – 6,000.00.
All 3 features active – 5 hold and win symbols – 8,700.00.

Against the 100.00 bet those are 45x, 60x and 87x. The steps are uneven in a revealing way: the second feature costs 15x extra, the third costs 27x. The studio is charging almost twice as much for the last one – which, given that Double Up is one of the three, is a fair reflection of what it does to a round.

A TIER selector sits above the three cards, set to 31 in the demo. That is Kalamba’s bet-tier system rather than a feature setting, and it is what scales every price on the panel.

The demo does buy the top option, and the game is candid about it: during that round the bet field reads 8,700.00 rather than 100.00. It is a useful reminder that a bought round is a single enormous stake, not a free extra.

The Prize Ladder

The plates down the left read 10,000.00, 2,000.00, 1,000.00 and 500.00 – 100x, 20x, 10x and 5x the bet – with a fifth value on the scarab medallion beneath them at 100,000.00, or 1,000x.

The gap between the top two is the striking part: the medallion is ten times the plate above it. And even that top tier is only a tenth of the game’s published ceiling, which tells you the maximum is not a jackpot at all but a full board of high coins passed through Double Up.

RTP, Volatility and Max Win

The RTP is 94.39%, volatility is rated Medium-High, and the maximum win is 10,000x the bet.

The return figure needs flagging. At 94.39% this sits well below the modern standard of around 96%, and Kalamba operates an RTP range on its titles – the same game can be configured differently by different operators, so the figure on the data sheet is one of several possible settings rather than a fixed property.

Medium-High fits the shape. Twenty lines on fifteen positions produce regular small results – the demo’s 100.00 and 340.00 spins are typical – while the real money sits in a round whose value depends entirely on which of the three features are running when it fires.

It makes the buy menu the most consequential decision on the screen. The cheapest option at 45x gets you into the round; the dearest at 87x gets you into it with everything switched on. Between those two sits most of the difference between a modest result and a large one.

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