Baby Bloomers

Players who have been concerned that online slots don’t have enough infant-friendly games to choose from can breathe a sigh of relief: Baby Bloomers is here. This five-reel, nursery-themed slot from Booming Games offers free spins featuring expanding wilds, so as to maximize profits for the whole family.

Theme

Anyone who has decorated (or spent time in) a nursery will feel right at home in this title’s pastel-dominated world. Gaming symbols include baby ducks, baby lambs, and baby rabbits, each with obscenely large eyes and an achingly cute design, as well as the playing card symbols ace through ten. A doe-eyed butterfly acts as wild, while also providing the game’s top-paying combination with 1,000 times the bet size for five-of-a-kind wins, while a hatching Easter Egg acts as scatter. The reels are framed by a green, sub-urban scene, complete with picket fences and a birdhouse. Sound design is very kid-friendly, which is to say, likely not all that appealing to adults.

Betting Options, Functions and Features

For all its childlike charm, it’s clear that a great deal of adult-level thinking has gone into this game’s finer points. There are 10 fixed paylines, each paying from left to right, with bet per line variable from 0.01–30.00. This yields a very broad overall per-spin betting range of 0.01–300.00 times the betting currency. Auto-spin up to 100 spins, quick spin, detailed payable and game rule information, as well as sound options are all available on pop-up screens. The overall theoretical return to player ratio sits around the industry average at 95.1%.

Though Baby Bloomers lacks variety in its bonus features, the expanding symbol feature renders free spins much more profitable than usual. The appearance of three of more Easter Egg scatter symbols trigger the free spin feature. Before free spins begin, an expanding symbol is selected at random: whenever three or more of the selected symbol appear on at least three different reels, these symbols will expand to fill their entire reels. Though the wild symbol will not substitute for the selected symbol, this is still a chance for major payouts, with the chance of all reels being entirely taken up by the selected symbols, with all paylines triggered.

Our Take

Baby Bloomers is built on a dubious premise. Very few players will be put off by the cute animals, and most will enjoy the excellent expanding symbols feature when free spins are achieved. Still, in terms of gaming substance, this game actually offers less than most of its competition, and Booming Games’ absurd decision to make a game for adults seem as if it were for children can only disguise this fact for so long. Most players will not want to linger here long, unless some time in the nursery is needed for emotional reasons.