Pirates’ Plenty Megaways review
Pirates’ Plenty Megaways is a seafaring Megaways slot from Red Tiger, released on 21 April 2021. You sail with Lady Anne Wild and her crew in search of treasure. Six reels up to seven symbols high are joined by an extra horizontal reel that unlocks as you play, and the return sits well above the market average. The game grew out of the 2019 Pirates’ Plenty and keeps its two big ideas: a monkey that steals cheap symbols, and a map you have to cross to unlock an extra reel.
Lady Anne and a thieving monkey
Red Tiger frames the game as a sea voyage in which Lady Anne Wild leads her crew toward wins of over 10,000x. The captain is more than a splash-screen character. Her symbol enters play as a special Wild, but only after you have sailed the ship across the map, so the story and the mechanics line up: the voyage to the treasure is literally a progress bar above the reels.
The other familiar face is the monkey that swipes low-value symbols off the board, a role carried over from the original. Recurring characters like these make the remake recognisable from the first spin, even though its grid and maths are entirely different. Once Wild Ways opens, an extra strip of symbols appears across the top, and that is where the captain can land, so a glance at the screen tells you which mode you are in.
Six reels and a shifting ways count
Ways pay here, and their number shifts every spin; a symbol has to appear on consecutive reels from the left to count. Each reel lands up to seven symbols tall, and, as on any Megaways engine, the ways count is the product of the six heights. With the extra reel still locked, the maximum is 7 to the sixth power, or 117,649.
A typical spin might land heights of 3, 5, 4, 6, 2 and 7, giving 3 × 5 × 4 × 6 × 2 × 7 = 5,040 ways. The short fifth reel cuts the total sharply, which is normal: one stubby reel can divide the ways count several times over. Short reels are also where chains most often die, because a reel two symbols high gives your symbol few chances to appear.
How the Wild Monkey cleans up
A Wild Monkey can appear at any time. It removes all low-paying symbols and locks onto the reels as a sticky Wild for that spin and any respins that follow.
Everything hinges on what fills the gaps. Once the cheap symbols are gone, new ones drop into their places, and some of them will be premiums. Meanwhile the monkey itself stays put as a Wild through the respins while the rest of the board refreshes, so each respin is another try at building a win around it. That leaves a cleaner board plus a sticky Wild to link new combinations around.
The treasure map and Wild Ways
The second mechanic is the map above the reels. Collecting map symbols sails the pirate ship across it, and even a blank spin sometimes brings a map symbol and nudges the ship closer. When it reaches the other side, Wild Ways unlocks: a horizontal reel is added on top, the ways count grows, and the Lady Anne Wild comes into play.
The arithmetic checks out neatly: if the horizontal reel adds one position to each of the four middle reels, the maximum is 7 × 8 × 8 × 8 × 8 × 7 = 200,704, about 1.7 times the standard mode. On ordinary spins the gain is smaller, but it always favours Wild Ways, since each extra position on a middle reel multiplies the total. Wild Ways raises the potential of every spin; it does not turn each one into a win.
Lady Anne’s multiplier Wild
She is an expanding Wild carrying a multiplier as high as 8x that can only land in the top positions of the four middle reels, and only once Wild Ways is unlocked.
Expanding means she fills her whole reel, so a chain that would have stopped there carries on, and her multiplier applies to the whole combination. Treat 8x as a ceiling rather than the norm, but even a 2x Lady Anne changes a spin, because the expansion both completes the chain and doubles it. The middle-reels-only rule also works in your favour: a Wild on reels two to five nearly always sits inside a chain, whereas the final reel would only matter for complete six-reel chains.
Nine free spins and a climbing multiplier
Three scatters open the free spins, which award 9 spins, with 3 more for every scatter beyond that, so four, five and six scatters bring 12, 15 and 18. A rising win multiplier applies during the round, and further scatters can retrigger more spins.
The longer the bonus, the higher the multiplier can climb, so every extra scatter is worth double, adding both spins and time for growth. An 18-spin round is twice the length of the base award, and a longer bonus is valuable mainly for its late, high-multiplier wins.
A generous return with rare wins
At 97.65%, the return is almost two points above the 2019 original and above Piggy Riches Megaways, another Red Tiger Megaways game, at 95.71%. NetEnt’s Blood Suckers goes higher still, 98% with low volatility. One RTP is listed, and no ante or purchase option to complicate it.
Expect big swings: volatility is high, and only 16.69% of spins produce a win, about one in six. Because spins are independent, ten blanks in a row will show up roughly 16% of the time. A high RTP and a low hit rate are not a contradiction: big events carry the return, namely monkey spins, Wild Ways and the bonus. How many map symbols a full crossing takes, how many respins the monkey brings, how often Lady Anne carries high values, the size of the free spins multiplier step and how often the bonus triggers are not published.
From the 2019 original to Megaways
The original launched on 27 February 2019 on a 5×3 grid with 20 lines. There, map pieces unlocked a sixth Treasure Reel that stayed unlocked once opened, and Wild Ships carried multipliers of x2, x3 or x5. Its monkey removed low symbols and stayed where the last one had been. Its Ocean Spins bonus gave 10 spins, during which a ghostly captain handed out keys to treasure chests.
| Feature | Pirates’ Plenty (2019) | Pirates’ Plenty Megaways (2021) |
|---|---|---|
| Grid | 5×3, 20 lines, sixth reel via map | 6 reels up to 7 high, top reel via map |
| RTP | 95.70% | 97.65% |
| Hit rate | 32.98% | 16.69% |
| Max win | 4,359x | 10,497x |
| Special Wild | Wild Ships x2, x3, x5 | Lady Anne up to 8x |
| Free spins | 10 Ocean Spins with keys and chests | 9 or more, rising multiplier |
The remake is much riskier, with the hit rate roughly halved and the ceiling more than doubled, and in exchange the return is far higher. The studio’s other games are gathered on the Red Tiger page.
