Cannonball Cash: Slot Overview

If the idea is that bigger automatically means better, it’s easy to understand why cannons came about in the first place, since they represent humanity’s drive to create weapons more powerful than those of its rivals. Curiously, the largest cannon ever built, The Tsar Cannon, was never used in battle and served more as a statement than a tool of war. If only that were true of every weapon. Still, reality is what it is. One field where cannons were used to brutal effect was naval combat, and Red Tiger’s associate R7 brings that firepower to its online slot Cannonball Cash.

The bombardment here is firmly in pirate territory, meaning players get hooks, parrots, and piles of loot—basically all the familiar swashbuckling imagery of the seven seas. Some pirate slots lean into a heavier mood, sending players down a grim, shadowy, dangerous route. Dead Man’s Trail by Relax Gaming or NetEnt’s Rage of the Seas, for instance. R7, on the other hand, embraces the pirate clichés but drops them into a bright, sunny setting, with visual nods to Novomatic’s Captain Venture, packed with vivid colours and backed by cheerful pirate tunes. Having options is never a bad thing.

On the subject of options, Cannonball Cash lets players pick a stake of 10 c to $/€10 per spin, and there are 2 feature buys available too. Playing the standard way on this medium-high volatile slot delivers a theoretical RTP of 95.72%. The action takes place on a 5-reel, 3-row grid, using a 243 ways to win system—wins start from the leftmost reel, and matching symbols must land on neighbouring reels.

Any symbols that form winning combinations are removed from the reels once they’ve paid. The gaps are then filled as symbols drop down, giving another opportunity to land a win. These chain reactions stop when a tumble produces no further win. There are ten pay symbols in total. The 5 low pays are 10-A card ranks, paying 0.4-0.5x the bet for 5 OAK, while the bottle of rum, a hook, coins on a map, a treasure chest, and a parrot make up the higher symbols, paying 1 to 50 times the bet for 5-of-a-kind. A pearl-bearing oyster acts as the wild symbol, showing up on the three middle reels and substituting for all paying symbols.

Cannonball Cash: Slot Features

Cannonball Cash’s bundle of features includes chain reaction wins, a base game Cannonball Bonus extra, free spins with merging wilds, and two feature buys.

Cannonball Ladder

In the base game, a ladder with 9 levels is positioned next to the reels. Any win moves the ladder up by 1 step. Beginning from the third step, each consecutive chain reaction win awards a pick in the Cannonball Bonus. Picks earned higher up the ladder can also carry a multiplier. For every step from 3 to 9 or more, players receive one pick, with multipliers increasing from x3 (at step 4) up to x100 at (step 9 or beyond).

Cannonball Bonus

Once a base game spin ends, if picks have been awarded from the ladder, the Cannonball Bonus begins. Here, every spot on the grid is replaced by a selectable cannon. Players pick cannons one at a time, matching the number of picks earned from the ladder. Each cannon reveals a random cash prize shown as a multiple of the stake, and any pick with a multiplier applies that multiplier to the prize revealed. There are 15 prizes in the Cannonball Bonus, ranging from 1x the bet to 25x the bet.

Free Spins

Scatter symbols can land on the leftmost and rightmost reels. Landing 2 scatters awards 8 free spins. During the feature, hitting 2 scatters grants an extra +8 free spins. In free spins, when wilds appear after wins have been paid, all wilds merge onto the central position of the middle third reel and remain locked there for the rest of the bonus. Every wild that merges after the first increases the symbol multiplier of the centre wild by +1 for the remainder of the round. The wild counts as as many symbols as the multiplier shown in the win ways calculation. The Cannonball Bonus is not available in free spins.

Feature Buy

Cannonball Cash’s feature buy lets players either pay 20x the bet for a spin that triggers the Cannonball Bonus or 50x the bet to purchase the free spins round. The feature buy’s RTP is 95.65%.

Cannonball Cash: Slot Verdict

Cannonball Cash is a slot that improved the longer it went on—not to spectacular levels, but it did climb from a fairly lukewarm first impression into something more engaging. Not quite “stranded on a Caribbean island” hot, but it definitely rose a degree or two. At first glance, it’s a flood of familiar pirate imagery in a familiar pirate backdrop of ship, treasure, and sea. Some players like their pirate slots drenched in gloom and hardship; others would rather imagine constant sunshine over their fantasy stash of gold, making it glitter. Cannonball Cash fits that second crowd better, helped along by a pleasant audio blend of harpsichord tones and seaside ambience.

From a mechanics standpoint, Cannonball Cash may suit players who enjoy frequent interaction, as the Cannonball Bonus seemed to trigger often enough to keep the picking going. Some titles award free spins after a set number of consecutive chain reaction wins (Pirate Kingdom Megaways, for example); Cannonball Cash rewards you with picks instead. The obvious incentive is the multiplier attached to picks when longer streaks of consecutive wins land. In the best-case scenario, the 25x prize lines up with the x100 multiplier, which would be a very solid outcome. It was slightly unexpected to see the Cannonball Bonus removed entirely during free spins. The merging wild mechanic is fine, but would it have been more logical to include or enhance the Cannonball Bonus rather than cutting it out altogether? We’ll never know.

When Cannonball Cash really catches a strong breeze, it can deliver wins up to 7,465.7x the bet, which is a hefty potential take. So while Cannonball Cash probably won’t dominate the Spanish Main or sack Cartagena, it does provide a few entertaining distractions for pirate-themed slot fans.