It is the season of new Christmas themed slot games and Realtime Gaming has launched one at its online casinos like Club World, Aladdin’s Gold and Silver Oak. Snowmania is, for a change, the absolutely conventional Christmas postcard type of video slot, far removed from the black humour of Santa versus Rudolph or the risqué humour of Naughty or Nice.

The background to the reels is a collage of white and blue. You can see the clear blue skies behind the snow laden fir trees. The comical and animated snowman to the left keeps the players entertained with his antics. The symbols are encapsulated in ice cubes. Snowmania uses only thematic symbols for awarding line payouts. They are stocking, bell, cracker, Santa’s hat, carrot, gingerbread man and holly. The top line payout is 2500 coins. The Ice Wild logo is the wild symbol. It appears only on reels 2, 3 and 4 and does not award line payouts.

The highlight of the Snowmania online slot game is the Crushing Symbols feature. All symbols in winning combinations are crushed after payouts are awarded. New symbols appear and if new winning combinations are formed then payouts are made again. The process continues until there are no new wins. The Morph Magic feature adds to the payouts. The first win is paid normally. But the payouts after the first Crush are doubled; after the second Crush they are tripled and multiplied five times thereafter. The important thing is that all this action takes place in the same paid spin. You do not pay anything for getting the Crushes.

Three or more present symbols appearing left to right on a payline award 10 free spins. Coinciding triggers each award 10 free spins. The Crushing Symbols feature is in operation as before but the Morph Magic feature gets better. The payout multipliers increase to 3x, 6x, 9x and 15x respectively. Any retrigger adds 5 more free spins. Snowmania is a fixed 20 paylines slot game in the 5x3 reels format. The maximum win per paid spin is 50,000 times the line bet.

This is the first time that Realtime Gaming has used a feature like Crushing Symbols. But if you have played at online casinos powered by other software providers you would have played similar online video slots before. Microgaming had recently launched Jungle Jim El Dorado and NetEnt has been running Gonzo’s Quest for quite a few years now.