Fishin' Frenzy

The spec sheet in one paragraph

Five reels, three rows, ten lines and a fishing boat scatter. Free games of 10, 15 or 20 rounds, during which a fisherman wild arrives and gathers the values printed on any fish in view. No wild in the base game, no multiplier ladder and no feature buy. RTP 96.12%, and Blueprint Gaming rates volatility High. On paper Fishin’ Frenzy is one of the leanest video slots around, and nearly everything worth discussing begins once three boats land.

That lean design is why it still matters. The fisherman-gathers-fish idea is the core that Blueprint Gaming has since reworked many times over, from Megaways and Big Catch to Jackpot King. The Merkur-listed build, which most reports describe as the Reel Time Gaming original used under licence, brings one twist of its own: you can run it on five lines or ten. The RTP is well documented. Neither studio publishes a top win, so any single figure deserves caution.

Spec table

Free games: the rule the series is built on

Since this is where nearly all of the game’s value lives, it comes first. The sequence below pulls together the official text from Blueprint Gaming, the Merkur page and rule summaries in circulation.

1. Three or more boats. Boat scatters anywhere on screen award 10 free games for three, 15 for four and 20 for five. Merkur and Blueprint Gaming agree on these counts.

2. Fish gain values. In the bonus, fish symbols show a value. The top fish is put at 50x the bet in rule summaries, and Merkur’s description is simple: bigger fish, bigger prize. The complete list of fish values and their frequencies is not published.

3. The fisherman joins the reels. It is a wild, standing in for everything except the scatter.

4. The fisherman gathers. According to Blueprint Gaming, every fisherman on screen hooks the fish and pays out the tag values as additional wins. Whenever a fisherman appears alongside one or more valued fish, every fish value on screen is paid.

5. Lines still pay. Because the fisherman is a wild, it may also finish a line win during the very spin in which it gathers, and the gathered values are added on top.

6. No extension. There is no retrigger; the bonus ends once the original 10, 15 or 20 games run out.

The two halves have to meet. A screen full of big fish with no fisherman pays nothing from the fish, and a fisherman with no fish has nothing to gather. Both land at random, and nothing you choose changes when they appear.

The fisherman’s wild role deserves a note of its own. On a bonus spin with no fish showing, it still substitutes on the lines, lifting a pair to three of a kind or four to five. Nowhere else in the game does a wild assist line wins, and that is one more reason the bonus outweighs the base game so heavily.

Two fishermen, double the haul

Gathering works fisherman by fisherman. Each one can take several fish at once, and a fish can be taken more than once. So a second fisherman landing alongside takes those fish once more; the Merkur rule summaries describe it as a double award when two appear together.

To show the rule, not a real result: suppose three fish in view add up to 12x the bet. One fisherman pays 12x, two pay 24x and three pay 36x. The fish stay the same; the fisherman count decides how many times they are paid.

That combination, big fish values plus several fish plus more than one fisherman on one spin, is where the game’s largest outcomes come from. How often multiple fishermen land is not published.

The later Megaways game spelled the idea out. There, extra fishermen are described as multiplying gathered fish values, and fish carry 1x, 3x, 5x or 10x the stake. Those values are specific to the Megaways game rather than the 2014 original, yet they show the direction the rule travelled.

Base game paytable: line wins and nothing else

Between bonuses, wins are counted from reel 1 along live lines. The boat scatter carries no line pay. The fisherman never shows up: rule summaries of the Merkur build say it only lands in free games.

Published paytables quote values both against the line stake and against the total stake on ten lines. Ten line stakes equal one total stake, so the columns agree:

Against the total stake, the card symbols pay 0.5x, 2.5x and 10x for three, four and five, and the rod pays 3x, 15x and 100x. The pelican is the only symbol said to pay from two of a kind, at 5x the line stake, with three, four and five paying 50x, 200x and 2,000x respectively.

Two conclusions follow. With no wild and no modifier, each base win depends purely on lining up symbols, which keeps them small. And the best possible base line is five pelicans, 200x the total stake on ten lines, which means anything larger has to come from the bonus. In the base game the fish is just another paying symbol; its second role waits for the free games.

The shape of the table also tells you how spins tend to feel. Card ranks fill the bottom, capping at 10x the total stake for five. The middle group of fish, bait box and life ring reaches 50x. Only the rod and the pelican get into three figures against the total stake. The pelican’s two-symbol pay is the one rule that lets short combinations count, which matters in a game with no base wild. Every other win needs three or more matching symbols starting from reel 1.

Merkur’s five-line mode explained

Merkur’s page states that the game runs at levels five to 200 on five lines, or ten to 400 on ten lines, so the active line count is a choice. Split the levels across the lines and the two modes line up:

Dropping to five lines does not make each line cheaper. It halves the total stake by switching off half the lines. Line pays are set per line, which means any win on a live line is worth the same in both modes. The loss is is coverage: anything that would have formed on lines six to ten is ignored.

Merkur is silent on two points: whether the fish values shrink along with the five-line total stake, and whether the RTP holds in both. Read the 96.12% figure as belonging to the normal ten-line setup unless the in-game information says otherwise.

In practice, five lines is a way to cut the cost per spin while keeping line values intact, at the price of half the routes a combination can take. The boat scatter counts from anywhere on screen, so the path into the bonus does not depend on line count the way line wins do. Because nobody publishes whether the gathered fish values shrink with the lower total stake, do not assume a five-line session offers the same bonus value relative to stake as a ten-line one.

Who made the Merkur-listed version

Most sources credit the original to Reel Time Gaming, the Australian developer set up in 2009, said to have licensed its 10-line game to both Merkur and Blueprint Gaming. Published histories of the series put the online launch in September 2014 and describe a land-based machine that Blueprint Gaming then adapted for online play.

Merkur’s page backs up the land-based link from its own side. It says Fishin’ Frenzy is in Merkur arcades and venues, where it sits in the machines’ My Top Game library as MTG code 87, and online through Merkur’s partner sites. Neither that page nor Blueprint Gaming’s, which calls its build a European casino style slot with 10 pay lines, mentions Reel Time Gaming.

Some lobbies show Blueprint Gaming or Merkur alone as the maker. The two companies sit in the same wider group, which goes some way to explaining why a single game carries different labels in different places.

In practice at least two close builds of the original exist. Each has the boat scatter, the fisherman who gathers fish, and bonus lengths of 10, 15 or 20 games. They may differ on line options, gambling a win and RTP settings. For example, Blueprint Gaming describes an optional red-or-black card guess once a win lands; the Merkur build summaries describe nothing of the kind. If that option matters to you, the help screen of the loaded game will confirm which build it is.

Return, swing and the length of a bonus

The most widely published RTP is 96.12%. That is a long-run design figure: over an enormous sample of spins, 96.12 units come back for every 100 staked on average. A short session is a different matter and does not mean any one session will finish near it.

Blueprint Gaming’s page for its build lists settings of 96.12%, 94%, 93%, 92% and 90%, so in the long run a lower configuration may pay back as much as 6.12 units fewer for every 100 staked. The reels do not show which setting is running; the information screen does. Which of these apply to the Merkur build, or to its five-line mode, is not published.

Blueprint Gaming rates volatility High, five of five, though some listings put it lower. The rules show why opinions split. The base game delivers modest line wins with no modifiers, which reads as low. The bonus, where several fishermen can gather the same fish more than once, can deliver much bigger outcomes. How swingy it feels depends on how the return divides between base and bonus, and that split is not published.

A low-to-medium design usually means smaller wins come round fairly often while larger outcomes are packed into a feature that must be triggered first. With no retrigger, a bonus has a fixed length set by the boats that started it. A five-boat start with 20 games offers the gather rule double the chances that a 10-game, three-boat start does.

A top win with three different numbers

The original’s maximum win is unresolved, and we do not choose between the candidates. Three numbers circulate: 50,000x, 10,000x and 5,000x the bet. Check the information screen for the cap on the build you open.

Neither Merkur nor Blueprint Gaming prints a top win on its game page. Different builds, stake limits or calculation methods could all explain the range. The source of any top result is clear, though. The best base line is 200x the bet, so a maximum in the thousands must come from the bonus, in which several fishermen can gather the same fish, each worth as much as 50x.

The franchise that followed

Reports put the series at roughly 25 titles, spread over standard slots, Megaways, Jackpot King progressive games and more. The table keeps to titles whose details are widely published, newest first. Every name begins with “Fishin’ Frenzy”, left off here for space.

Merkur has a branch of its own. Fishin’ Frenzy Xtra Catch, on Merkur Gaming’s site, uses a 10-line, 5-reel base game, then widens to 6×3 and 729 ways for the bonus, where a goldfish brings multipliers and three or more boats give up to 20 free games.

Most releases add one headline change and keep the fish-and-gather core. Sequels alter how fish values grow, how fishermen are counted or how many ways are active. None drops the rule the original set down: a fish pays its tag only when a fisherman is there to take it.

Good fit, poor fit

Good fit: players who want to understand a slot in one read, with one scatter, one bonus, one wild and one gather rule. The Merkur five-or-ten-line option lets you trim total stake while leaving pay values alone. History fans will also like seeing where today’s collect-style fishing slots began.

Poor fit: anyone who wants activity in the base game, because nothing wild appears outside the bonus and the top base line is 200x the bet. It also disappoints players who want a clearly published top win.

Strong points and weak points

Strong points

• A simple gather rule, set out on the studio pages: a fisherman in free games takes every fish value in view.
• Additional fishermen take the same fish again, which gives the bonus genuine range.
• 96.12% is the widely published RTP for the standard version.
• The Merkur build runs five or ten lines with the same per-line stake range.

Weak points

• No base-game wild, so the spins between bonuses are plain.
• No top win published by a studio; listings disagree between 5,000x, 50,000x and 10,000x.
• Blueprint Gaming’s build includes settings as low as 90%, and the bonus cannot be retriggered.

Fishin’ Frenzy questions answered