Play Joker's Jewels Hold & Spin

Joker's Jewels Hold & Spin by Pragmatic Play keeps things remarkably simple: five reels, five paylines, one jester and a pile of crown-stamped Money symbols waiting in the wings. The game takes the familiar Joker's Jewels formula and adds a Hold & Spin round without turning the reels into a control panel for a small aircraft. Its main attraction is straightforward, with conventional line wins leading into a sticky Money-symbol bonus when three or more crowns appear. 

Joker's Jewels Hold & Spin goes firmly down the old-school casino route, placing its five reels inside a machine-style cabinet surrounded by purple diamond patterns, gold trim and stacks of coins. The jester is naturally given top billing, joined by instruments, juggling pins, shoes and coloured gemstones. Among modern online slots, it's deliberately unfussy, with most of the screen devoted to the reels rather than characters wandering around performing elaborate animations. 

There's a slight circus feel to the soundtrack and imagery, although the shiny cabinet keeps the overall look closer to traditional online casinos than a full big-top production. The faux-physical machine design fits the rest of the Joker's Jewels series nicely, and the restrained presentation makes the crown Money symbols easy to spot when they arrive.

The regular symbols cover a small collection of circus props, gemstones and the jester himself. The Joker sits comfortably at the top of the table, while the blue circle is the only regular symbol capable of producing a potential return from two matching symbols. 

• The Money Symbol: Represented by a gold coin carrying a crown. Each Money symbol receives a random value from a predefined set when it lands, and three or more Money symbols anywhere on the grid trigger the Hold & Spin feature. 
• Joker's Jewels Hold & Spin doesn't use a Wild symbol, so regular combinations have to form entirely from matching paying symbols. 

Hold & Spin 

Landing at least three Money symbols anywhere on the reels activates Hold & Spin after any regular line wins have been settled. The triggering Money symbols remain in position while the ordinary symbols disappear, leaving a grid containing only Money symbols and blank spaces. 

The feature begins with three respins. Any new Money symbol that lands locks into place for the rest of the round and resets the counter to three. This continues until the respins run out or every available position has been filled. Once the round ends, the values attached to all collected Money symbols are added together to determine the potential bonus payout. 

Joker's Jewels Hold & Spin uses a 5x3 reel setup with five fixed paylines. Regular winning combinations are formed from left to right on adjacent reels, beginning with the leftmost reel. Only the highest qualifying combination on each line is counted. 

The base game is unusually stripped back by current standards. There are no cascades, expanding reels or roaming modifiers; most spins revolve around straightforward line combinations and the possibility of landing enough Money symbols to move into Hold & Spin. That makes the transition into the bonus round fairly easy to follow, since the feature simply replaces normal reel play with sticky Money symbols and resetting respins. 

For something in roughly the same visual neighbourhood, these three online casinos games keep the jester-and-classic-casino theme close at hand: 

• Joker's Jewels Wild: Another entry in the same series, retaining the colourful jester theme while introducing Wild-based mechanics. 
• Joker's Jewels Cash: Keeps the traditional casino-machine presentation while putting greater emphasis on cash-related symbols and prizes. 
• Joker's Jewels Hot: Another addition to the series that strips the concept down even further, making it the most barebones version of Pragmatic Play's jester-themed range. 

With this release Pragmatic Play deliberately resisted bolting twelve extra mechanisms onto a game that really doesn't need them. The five-line format is definitely old-fashioned, the artwork makes no attempt to hide that fact, and the Hold & Spin feature adds just enough movement to separate this version from the simpler entries in the series. 

We think that restraint is both its strength and its weakness. The bonus is uncomplicated and the Money values give it a clear purpose, but there isn't much else happening between those moments. Anyone expecting constant modifiers will find the cupboard fairly bare. As a retro-style jester slot with one central feature, though, it sticks closely to the identity the series has built.