Betting on horse racing is basically a socially acceptable way of shouting “come on, Kevin!” at an animal you’ve never met while watching numbers flash on a screen. You study the form like a seasoned analyst, convince yourself you’ve cracked the code, and then promptly lose to a horse named something like Mildly Damp Biscuit.

Why bet on horse racing when you can bet on a slot with a horse racing theme like the Derby Rush slot from BGaming?

On your marks

The Derby Rush slot features 20 paylines across five reels. Betting starts from $0.20 per spin and is capped at $50. At the top end, the 5,000x max multiplier means you’ll have a shot at up to $250,000 in winnings.

With low to medium volatility, the gameplay offers small, consistent wins as you chase those bigger numbers. The slot’s expected RTP is a healthy 97.2%.

Play Now

The game features three instant-win prize symbols. The blue version offers between 0.5x and 0.75x your bet, the purple between 1x and 1.5x, and the red between 2.5x and 5x.

During the base game, if three or more instant-win prize symbols land on a payline, their values are added together and awarded.

The free spins feature is triggered by landing three or more bonus symbols. During free spins, wild symbols can appear.

If a wild lands on the same spin as instant-win prize symbols, it collects the values of all instant-win symbols on the reels and awards the total multiplier. If multiple wilds appear on a single spin, each will collect and award the full total.

Play Now

Free spins also introduce a retrigger meter above the reels. The meter collects wild symbols and awards ten additional spins for every four collected. Each new set of spins is triggered with a progressively increasing multiplier.

Apart from triggering a round with three bonus symbols, the slot also offers a buy bonus feature. The feature gives you a few options to choose from when purchasing a round of free spins.

A quirky element of the slot is the spin counter. It will count the number of spins you make between activations of the free spins feature. It has no function apart from that.

Is the Derby Rush slot ready to race?

There is a part of me that feels that if you’re going to release a horse racing game, there needs to be some actual horse racing in it. Judging by its new Derby Rush slot, BGaming does not seem to share that belief. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. The issue is that there is very little here that makes it feel like a horse-racing slot, aside from the graphics.

You could pretty much slap any visuals on top of these mechanics, and nothing would need to change. While BGaming is hardly alone in this, it does make the slot a little forgettable, despite the healthy RTP and low volatility. I give it a seven out of ten.

If you’re looking for a few BGaming slots I recommend, try Snoop Dogg Dollars and Gates of Power.