5 Must-Play Holiday Games in December
Christmas is coming, and the most special time of the year is upon us once more! Naturally, our picks for December take into account the holiday magic and are related to the festivities in one way or the other. However, you’ll be surprised at the exciting twists some of them offer.
They are incredibly fun and will keep you engaged this December and beyond. Even though the winter solstice is upon us in the northern hemisphere and the darkest days of the year are coming, the exact opposite happens in the southern hemisphere. This is also portrayed in some of our top picks in ingenious ways, as you’ll soon discover.
They are varied enough so you won't get tired easily, and we recommend you take time to discover them all. Without further ado, here they are!
Santa’s Ways
Santa's Ways is the way to go if you are looking for a more traditional Christmas experience but with interesting features. First, the game looks beautiful. It has warm lighting and fantastic high-resolution graphics and distills Christmas magic everywhere you look. The animations are great, too, such as snow coming down whenever a reel spins.
It has typical Christmas symbols such as Santa and a reindeer, but underneath all that is a volatile slot with chances to win big time. Also, even with its traditional looks, there are a lot of modern features in this 5x3 slot.
There are tumbling reels, expanding wilds that cover two reels, and the Christmas Tree, a scatter that triggers up to 25 free spins. During the free spin rounds, you can win up to 10x your wager!
Snow Wonder
As we mentioned, the festivities are packed with slot games for everyone. If the slots up to now were full of complex mechanics, bonus rounds, and unusual settings, Snow Wonder is a classic gamer’s dream.
The premise is simple: there are three reels, and you win by getting matching symbols in the only payline available. Much like classic fruit slots, you get 7s, bars, and other familiar symbols, but the twist here is that fruits are exchanged for Christmas-themed symbols such as pine cones, bells, and others.
It's a simple game with a beautiful snowy background and should be at the top of your list for uncomplicated gaming sessions when you don’t want to read long how-to-play pages and remember complex rules.
Reel Crime: Stealing Christmas
Remy and Raoul, the notorious duo from Rival, return once more, this time finding themselves in a Christmas-themed setting. While maintaining the essence of the previous Reel Crime 1 and Reel Crime 2 editions, there are notable changes in the gameplay experience. Players begin on a 5x3 layout with 243 ways to win and can advance through the game, gradually unlocking extra rows and accessing a maximum of 3,125 winning ways.
Step into the residence of a young boy protecting his home against two intruders, Remy and Raoul, set on infiltrating and stealing the festive joy of Christmas. Your spinning can aid him in thwarting these criminals and saving the winter holiday season.
There are many features game-wise. The boy represents the wild, and the two criminals represent the scatter symbol. Landing three, four or five scatters launches five, 10 and ten free spins respectively on an expanded 5x4 grid. If you land on more scatters, you’ll receive more free spins on a bigger 5x5 grid.
Jack Frost
Continuing with the unusual approach to the holidays, Jack Frost is another title filled with surprises. In this game, Jack Frost controls cold things, and his brother Harold Heat, well, hot things! It means there's a battle between hot and cold here with some interesting elements.
The game's setting is cold, and you are greeted with winter and Christmas stuff like ski goggles, decorated trees, and more. However, the idea is to melt the ice, and there's an exciting minigame where you can melt ice blocks to win free spins or cash.
If you get free spins, Harold shows up, turning everything into a beach setting, symbols included. It’s a great concept and makes it very exciting as you never know when the change will happen. It’s like playing two slots in one!
Polar Heatwave
Lastly, Polar Heatwave is yet another unique title for this season. The premise is to bring summer to the South Pole, as it’s the exact opposite of what happens in the Northern Hemisphere during this time of the year.
To do so, you need to get blazing suns to turn the temperature up, melting game elements and allowing you to get free spins, sticky wilds, and more. It has different levels as you go from -20C to 0C in the thermometer by collecting bonus symbols.