Chocolates

Theme & presentation

Big Time Gaming took its 2019 confection Donuts, swapped the sprinkles for pralines and gave us Chocolates in October 2020. It is, unapologetically, the same idea dressed in a shinier wrapper: a 4x4 grid sitting on a soft, gift-box backdrop, premium symbols rendered as glossy truffles and ganache squares, and a rotating clock-hand scatter that feels lifted straight from a chocolatier’s shop window. It is pleasant rather than striking. The audio is jaunty confectionery-shop stuff that I muted after ten spins, and the animations are clean without ever making me sit up. Nobody buys a BTG game for the art, though, and Chocolates knows it.

How it plays

You start on 256 ways in the base game, and the hook here is the Box feature. Yellow boxes stamped with the BTG logo drop onto any reel and pop open to reveal up to four premium chocolate symbols, and crucially the boxes on a given reel always reveal the same symbol. Stack enough boxes and you effectively fill columns with matching premiums, which is how the ways-count balloons upward — the base game can climb from 256 to as many as 2,401 ways when boxes pile up. It is a neat, tactile mechanic that gives the base game more texture than most 4x4 grids manage, and it is the engine that carries the whole game.

The feature

The headline act is the Free Spins round, triggered by three or four clock-hand scatters for 7 or 10 spins respectively. When the bonus starts, every box symbol that lands becomes sticky and stays locked for the whole feature, and if a full reel ends up covered in sticky boxes you are awarded 3 extra free spins — the round’s retrigger. That is also where the ways-count can balloon all the way to 65,536, since a full screen of four-symbol boxes can technically pack 16 symbols onto every reel. The other star is the Golden Ticket Wild, which carries a x6 multiplier applied to every winning combination it joins. Multiple wilds multiply together, so two make x36 and three stack to x216 — that is where the game’s ceiling lives. Combine sticky box coverage with several Golden Tickets and the maths gets silly fast, which is the whole point.

The numbers, straight

• Max win: 65,536x stake (confirmed on BigWinBoard and SlotCatalog)
• RTP: 96.6%
• Volatility: High. Reputable sources rate it high, and it plays that way — swingy and top-heavy. BigWinBoard reckons it is toned down a touch versus Donuts, and I’d agree it feels a hair friendlier, but it is still very much a high-variance grind
• Reels/ways: 4x4 grid, 256 ways at the base (up to 2,401 with boxes), and up to 65,536 ways in the feature
• Hit rhythm: I won’t lean on a single quoted hit-frequency figure — expect the usual BTG diet of long dry runs punctuated by box-driven bursts

Verdict

Chocolates is a competent, likeable retread. If you enjoyed Donuts, this is the same engine with a slightly friendlier temperament and an identical 65,536x sky. The Box feature genuinely adds interest to the base game, and the Golden Ticket multiplier stack gives the free spins a proper top end. But there is no new idea here — it is comfort food, not a revelation — and the 96.6% RTP, while a hair above BTG’s usual, is still just above average rather than generous. I had a good time; I did not feel I’d seen anything I hadn’t seen before.

SlotWhizz rating: 3.6/5. A solid, replayable BTG grid with a real top end, but a safe iteration rather than a standout — and remember the 3.4% house edge baked into that 96.6% never sleeps.

18+. Demo for fun, not profit. Free-play results don’t reflect real-money outcomes; the house keeps an edge. Play responsibly.