Ivan and the Immortal King: slot review and demo

Ivan and the Immortal King review

SlotAtlas editorial team · updated 6 October 2026

Ivan and the Immortal King came out on 11 December 2018 as Quickspin’s twelfth release of that year, and it is perhaps the most recognisable fairy tale in the studio’s catalogue. The game retells the story of Ivan Tsarevich and the deathless Koschei, and builds its mechanics on the chain “chest, hare, duck, egg, needle”. Volatility on the studio sheet is 5 out of 5, the RTP is 96.29%, and the best result in the studio’s statistics reached 12,402 bets. The studio publishes more data than usual, from a split of the return by game part to the frequencies of big wins.

A needle in an egg, an egg in a duck

The plot is familiar to anyone who has read Russian fairy tales. Koschei the Deathless keeps mountains of plundered gold, and his death is hidden in a needle. The needle lies in an egg, the egg in a duck, the duck in a hare, the hare in a chest. To win you must find the chest, kill the hare, catch the duck, break the egg and snap the needle. The studio describes it with humour: “easy, right”.

The designers turned the chain into a ladder. Five items and the head of Koschei himself correspond to six multiplier levels: chest x1, hare x2, duck x3, egg x5, needle x10, skull x20. The decision is rare in slots, because the story here is not decoration but a progress scale, visible on the screen to the left of the reels.

A 5×3 grid and twenty lines

In the studio’s demo the screen shows five reels of three rows and twenty active lines. The bet starts at 0.20, the maximum is 100 and the default is 1; in some jurisdictions the operator narrows the range itself. The game has no bonus buy.

One discrepancy deserves mention. In the December 2018 press release the game is described as a slot with four rows, five reels and forty lines, while the demo shows a different picture: three rows and twenty lines.

Symbols: from Ivan down to the triangles

The characters in the game are drawn recognisably. Ivan is a young man in a red cap with gold trim, and he is the most valuable symbol. Koschei looks like a lean old man with a pale face and a sharp beard, wearing a horned crown. Vasilisa is shown in a green dress with a long braid and a large golden headdress. A grey wolf with glowing eyes recalls the hero’s fairy-tale helper, and the purple three-headed dragon sits on the bottom rung among the characters. Below come five plainer figures: two cut gems and three coloured triangles.

The help screen lists payouts at a 1.00 bet, so they read directly as multiples of the whole stake. A win counts along a line, for three, four or five identical symbols in a row.

The Wild pays like Ivan and substitutes for all symbols except the two kinds of scatter. The top of the scale is five heroes or five wilds on a line, 100x, while five gems bring 6.25 bets. That sixteenfold gap explains why noticeable combinations are rare in the base game and the large results come from the bonus.

Six free-spin levels

The bonus ladder is set out in the game’s help as a table. The level fixes both the number of spins and the multiplier that applies to every win.

Each new level adds exactly 4 spins. So climbing from the first to the sixth level means gaining 20 extra spins and multiplying the multiplier twentyfold. Spins and multiplier grow together, which strengthens the effect: there is no step on the ladder where the player gives up one for the other.

If the whole bonus ran at one level, spins times multiplier would come to 10 at the chest and 600 at the skull, a factor of sixty. That is not a payout but an index of potential, and in practice levels change along the way. That is why the average bonus result says little about what you will see in a particular case.

Reaching the right level

The bonus is launched by three or more Bonus Scatter symbols. Three give 10 spins at the chest level, four give 14 spins at the hare level, five give 18 spins at the duck level. So the starting level depends on the scatter count: the more there are, the higher you begin.

Inside the bonus a progression runs, as is usual for free spins with a growing multiplier: every three collected Progress Scatter symbols switch on the next level and add 4 spins. Reaching the skull takes 15 such symbols from a chest start, 12 from the hare and only 9 from the duck. That is why five scatters at the start are so prized: they save six Progress Scatters compared with the minimum start. How many Progress Scatters land on average per bonus, the studio does not say.

Baba Yaga: scatters on demand

The special function is called the Baba Yaga Surprise. The witch likes to turn up when the player is short of scatters. When she arrives she hides four random adjacent symbols and then replaces them in one of two ways. First: one to three of the hidden symbols become Bonus Scatters in the base game or Progress Scatters in the bonus. Second: one random paying symbol replaces all hidden ones, which guarantees a win.

In the base game the witch helps you reach the bonus, and inside the bonus she raises the level. The guarantee of a win in the second variant does not promise a large sum: the size depends on which symbol is chosen. By the studio sheet this function supplies 3.05% of the total RTP. The figure is small, but it shows the witch works rarely.

Where the 96.29% comes from

The studio lays out the return by parts, which is not often seen: 51.09% comes from the base game, 3.05% from the Baba Yaga function and 42.15% from free spins. Almost 44% of the return sits in the bonus, while the base game returns just over half. While there is no bonus, the balance shrinks faster than the total RTP suggests: in that stretch you get back only about 54 cents on the euro staked. The sheet gives no bonus frequency, so it cannot tell you how quickly you will reach the free spins.

Win odds from the sheet

The Quickspin document divides into several blocks. “Information” lists bets and volatility, the RTP block splits the return into parts, and “Win Probabilities” shows frequencies by category. The figures come from simulation, not real play.

A Big Win of 15 bets or more lands on average once per 95 spins, a Super Win of 40 bets once per 257, a Mega Win of 70 bets once per 543 and an Epic Win of 100 bets once per 944. The categories overlap: a win of 100 bets is at once Big, Super, Mega and Epic, so the frequencies show the probability of a win at least as large as stated, not exactly that size. These are averages: in real runs the gaps between wins of 15 bets swing from a few spins to a few hundred, and over two hundred spins four players in five will not see a win of a hundred bets.

The 12,402x maximum and a note on statistics

The sheet lists “max payout 12,402 times the bet in five billion spins”. That is not a hard limit, as in some games, but the maximum observed in simulation. The studio names no official cap, so under other conditions the game may pay more.

No person will live through five billion spins, so for a particular player such a payout is a purely theoretical possibility. Closer to reality is the top of the paytable: five heroes on a line pay 100x, and in free spins at the skull level a 20x multiplier acts on ordinary wins.

A five on the Quickspin scale

The sheet records volatility as the number 5 on a scale from one to five, that is, the maximum. The press release says highly volatile, while the game page and the sheet’s own text say extremely volatile. There is no contradiction: the studio says the same thing in different words, and a five-step scale is just one way of describing volatility.

Two other studio games show the usual trade. Sakura Fortune is also very volatile, with a 96.58% RTP and a 1,023x maximum, while Big Bad Wolf is calmer (high volatility) and pays back more, 97.34%, with a 1,225x maximum. Ivan returns slightly less than its neighbours, but its upper bound is an order of magnitude higher.