[Slot review] Happy Fish — Booongo

Overview

Happy Fish is a 6x7-grid slot Booongo (BNG) released on 3 March 2022. The catalogue lists three features: Free spins, Multipliers and Bonus buy. It is the board's second Booongo review.

Where the 3 Royal Coins review covered this catalogue's minimum build — 3x3, five lines — this title sits at the other end. The grid is 6x7, among the largest in the set, and the ways figure is 117,649. Yet the same record also carries a lines value of 649. A ways-style title also carrying a line count is unusual even within this catalogue, and it is the reason this review picked the game.

Layout and rules

117,649 is arithmetic that checks out. Read the 6x7 grid as six reels with seven symbol positions each, and 7 to the 6th power — 7×7×7×7×7×7 — lands on exactly that figure. A rare case where the published grid and the published ways count confirm each other.

The 649 line figure does not fit that arithmetic, though. Lines and ways are not usually the same grid's two co-existing formats — one counts fixed lines, the other routes across adjacent reels, and they are different arithmetics for a reason. Why both values are recorded here, and which one the game actually runs on, cannot be answered from the catalogue entry alone. This review does not guess at the answer and leaves the contradiction as it stands — the in-game rules screen is the only source with the real pay type.

The listed features are Free spins, Multipliers and Bonus buy. A bonus buy generally implies the purchase price reflects roughly how many spins the feature would otherwise take to reach, but the exact entry odds or price are not in the catalogue.

Reading the numbers

RTP and volatility appear nowhere in this catalogue, and this title is no exception. What this section can read instead is the line between what grid scale tells you and what it doesn't. A ways count of 117,649 means the base game has that many possible combination routes per spin — not that combinations land often, and not that payouts run large. Path count and payout frequency or size are different values, and the latter is set by the whole paytable, which is not published.

Worth noting too: this site's format display prioritises ways over lines for Booongo titles. When both values exist on one record, the 649 line figure never surfaces in the listing screen — only '117,649 ways' does. A display rule choosing one value to show does not make the other disappear; only opening the raw entry, as this review did, reveals that the 649 exists at all.

Set beside 3 Royal Coins (3x3, five lines), the range of grid scale this catalogue covers becomes visible: nine cells on one end, six reels of seven positions each on the other — a considerable spread of design weight within a single studio's catalogue. What stays the same across both is how little RTP and volatility, being absent, let either title be read beyond this.

Presentation

The cover compresses the scene into a single fish with a very large smile, swimming past on business it does not explain; the reef behind it stays decoration and nothing more. Bright and simple enough to read at thumbnail size — a cover that looks designed for the lobby grid.

The demo is served from the studio's own site and is embedded on this page. Given the unusual pairing of a ways figure and a line figure on one record, open the rules screen first and check which pay type the game actually displays — a question this review leaves open rather than answers for you.