Charlie Chance in Hell to Pay review
Three reels, three rows and five fixed lines: Charlie Chance in Hell to Pay feels like a fruit machine that wandered into a cartoon from the 1930s. Play’n GO released it on 21 May 2020, and the studio rates volatility “6, medium”. The cast is a trio of Wilds, a tiny Scatter icon in the corner of ordinary symbols and a game board across which Charlie himself walks.
Charlie in hell and a Fleischer-style cartoon look
The story is brief and jokey. Charlie Chance woke up, put on his top hat and went about his business, but a string of poorly judged decisions plunged his soul into the darkest corners of the underworld. His only weapon is an umbrella, and his opponent is the treacherous She-Devil with her army of mindless minions. The subtitle reads: he’s done it again.
The studio describes the visuals as light-hearted horror inspired by the work of Max Fleischer: the action plays against a blazing inferno, and the symbols come from the golden age of slot machines. Hell’s Bells, the number 666 and the Bar pay best, and Grapes, Apple, Lemon and Cherry pay least. So what you see is retro fruit in surroundings that look like black-and-white animation with red tongues of flame.
The paytable: only three of a kind pays
With three reels, only a triple on a line wins. The sheet states outright that the numbers count whole-stake units, never line-bet units: a triple of HP3 brings four total bets.
| Symbol | Three of a kind, x total bet |
|---|---|
| Wild | 8.00 |
| HP3 | 4 |
| HP2 | 3 |
| HP1 | 2 |
| LP4 | 0.80 |
| LP3 | 0.80 |
| LP2 | 0.40 |
| LP1 | 0.40 |
The cheapest line pays 0.40 of the bet and the richest regular one pays 4, a tenfold gap, or twentyfold with the Wild. Five-reel Play’n GO slots can spread hundreds of times across the table, but here the range is squeezed simply because there is one combination. No triple of low symbols repays the stake: a spin with only grapes or apples counts as a win on screen but is a loss. The high symbols, by contrast, pay more than the stake on a single line.
The lines are fixed and pay left to right, and none can be switched off. One spin can trigger several lines at once, and the payouts add up: a triple of HP1 on one line and a triple of LP1 on another give 2.40 bets. The sheet does not tie specific pictures to the labels HP1 to HP3 and LP1 to LP4, so which high symbol pays four and which pays three is visible only in the game itself.
Three Wilds and multipliers up to x27
The game has three kinds of Wild: a plain one and two that carry x2 and x3 multipliers. Any Wild replaces the other symbols except the Scatter, and the multiplier applies to the combinations the Wild helped build, line by line. Several multipliers on one line multiply together: x2 and x3 give x6, two x3 give x9, and three x3 give x27.
A triple of Wilds on a line pays 8 bets by itself, and if all three carry x3 the payout reaches 8 times 27, or 216 bets. A combination of HP3 with two x3 Wilds gives 4 times 9, or 36 bets. If three x3 Wilds line up horizontally, one line pays with x27 and the other lines are counted by ordinary rules. Lines like these turn a modest table into a source of large payouts.
The corner Scatter and the Feature Board
The Scatter is unusual: it is not a separate symbol on the reel but a small icon in the corner of regular symbols. It can show up beside any of them, Wilds do not replace it, and on a reel of only three positions it takes none of them. Three Scatter icons on the reels start the Feature Board.
When the board starts, the She-Devil conjures a number of spaces, Charlie steps forward and collects the prize of the space he lands on.
| Prize | What it gives |
|---|---|
| Instant prize | a cash payout at once |
| Re-spin with Wilds | a repeat spin with random Wilds added to the reels |
| Re-spin with multiplier | a repeat spin with a random multiplier of x2, x3 or x25 |
| Win Spin | a spin with a guaranteed win |
| 8 Free Spins | eight free spins |
The rules note separately that every prize apart from the Win Spin does not guarantee a win. A re-spin with x25 can come up empty, and the multiplier then multiplies nothing, while a re-spin with random Wilds only raises the chance of a combination. The Win Spin guarantees a win but not its size: when only low symbols take part it may be modest. The Wild multiplier tops out at x27 on a single line, while the re-spin multiplier acts on the whole spin; how they combine is not spelled out, so multiplying x27 by x25 cannot be assumed.
Free Spins: a cumulative Scatter meter
In free spins the Scatter icons are collected over the round. Three collected icons launch the Feature Board with the same prizes as in the base game. If Free Spins land during the bonus, another eight spins are added to the total.
When the meter is full, further icons count towards it after the feature fires, and the meter itself resets once the board triggers. Remaining free spins carry on after the feature plays out. It forms a kind of loop: the bonus feeds the board, and the board sometimes returns the bonus.
Since icons accumulate across spins, not within one, a short bonus of eight spins offers a limited number of chances to reach three, and each re-award extends the window by eight more. The length of the bonus depends not only on the entry but on how often the board hands Free Spins back.
RTP, bets and the 6,666x cap
Besides the base 96.23%, the sheet names four more RTP versions: 94.79%, 91.33%, 87.59% and 84.71%. A footnote says default values may vary by market and one setting is excluded for Malta-licensed operators, so check the figure at a given casino in the rules window.
Five lines make up the bet: a coin value from 0.02 to 20.00 is multiplied by five, which explains the total bet limits of 0.10 and 100. An operator may change the coin set, and the sheet warns outright that when default bets are altered, the maximum wins change too.
The number 6,666 echoes the 666 on the symbols. Maximum exposure on the sheet is 666,600 at a bet of 100, and the probability of reaching the cap is below one chance in a hundred million. Even a triple x3 Wild on one line gives only 216 bets, almost thirty times short of the cap, and a re-spin with x25 lengthens the chain without guaranteeing it. Big results here are built on Wild multipliers and re-spins, and the realistic yardstick is tens and hundreds of bets.
The sheet gives no hit frequency, no frequency of Feature Board starts, no size for the instant prize, no count of spaces on the board or spread of prizes, and no bonus contribution to total RTP, so the average value of the bonus cannot be worked out. The trial version opens on the studio’s own servers and works without an account.
Three reels among Play’n GO games
The studio’s genre classic is Fire Joker, released on 13 June 2016 with an RTP of 96.15% and a cap of 800x, and in cap terms Charlie beats it more than eightfold. A relative in spirit, Ice Joker, appeared on 3 December 2020 with the same default RTP but a completely different presentation. Against big grids, clusters and thousands of ways, a format of three reels and five lines swims against the current: each spin is judged in a second, and the complexity is moved into multiplier Wilds and the board.
