Scruffy Duck Slot
Scruffy Duck is a 5-reel, fixed 25 pay line online slot from NetEnt. It was released exclusively at Leo Vegas Casino on January 12, 2017, with the plan to roll out to other online casinos thirty or so days later.
Scruffy Duck is the latest in a very long line of cartoon or puppet ducks. Donald Duck (Disney) and Daffy Duck (Warner Bros) are probably the two most well-known. How about Edd the Duck from the 1980s, or Orville 'I wish I could fly' the Duck? In other media, most children learn about the story of the 'ugly duckling' who was repeatedly body-shamed on Twitter. Sounds like a load of mallards to us.
There's a whole family of ducks in this NetEnt game – from a lollipop-wielding duckling to a yuppie-type duck brandishing a mobile phone. They are joined on the reels by egg-cracking playing card symbols jack through to ace, along with Scruffy Duck (we presume) himself, who acts as a wild symbol.
There are twenty-five pay lines in total, and that number is fixed. You can choose your coin value, though – anything from 0.01 to 1.00. You can also choose your bet level from one to ten, which is effectively the number of coins you wish to gamble with each spin. You total bet per spin is your coin size multiplied by your bet level multiplied by twenty-five. When you're ready to get cracking (or quacking), hit the spin button.
Payout & bonus rounds
The lowest winning payout in this game is for three jacks. This will award you three coins. The jackpot in normal play is won by landing five of the yuppie duck right across an active pay line. Achieve this and you will find four hundred coins tumbling into your account.
Scruffy Duck appears as a wild, and he substitutes for all other symbols aside from the free spins symbol. On occasion Scruffy Duck will transform into a beautiful swan – he becomes an expanding wild that fills all three rows of the reel upon which he landed. In free spins the expanding wild can also become a colossal wild, where one wild covers nine reel positions in a 3×3 grid.
The 'Free Spins' symbol appears on reels three, four and five. You need to land a symbol on each reel in order to activate the free spins feature. You then get to pick a duck, who will reveal the free spins prize you've obtained:
- 15 free spins with a 3x multiplier
- 12 free spins with low-paying symbols removed
- 10 free spins with colossal wilds
- 8 free spins with random wilds
- 6 free spins with two of the four features mentioned above
This is a rarity for NetEnt, the provision of a slightly disappointing slot. The graphics are fine, but just that – fine, and the whole cartoon aspect seems a little childish to us. The features we have all seen before, although not quite presented in this way. We're going to have to shuffle this to one side and wait for the next great NetEnt release, which will surely come!