Pragmatic Play · 2024 · tested 2026-09-10
Fire Portals
Fire Portals combines roaming wilds with a second calculation after they merge; this review follows 477 logged mergers and a demo test in which 45 of 50 bonus buys lost money.
Watch the payout before the portals join. The new multiplier belongs to later combinations, and even a large merged portal still needs another win: 45 of our 50 purchases returned less than their price.
measured over 10,000 spins · 50 buys
Is Fire Portals worth playing?
quick answerThe interesting part of Fire Portals is what happens after a paying cluster: wilds can grow and merge, leaving a larger factor waiting for another combination. Our ordinary-play sample recovered 96.26% of its stakes, with its largest round occurring outside free spins. The separate fifty-purchase series was much weaker at 57.19%, and only five entries covered their USD 200 cost.
Test card
10,000 spins · USD 2.00 bet · every request logged| Spins | 10,000 |
| Bet | USD 2.00 |
| RTP declared | 96.06% |
| RTP measured | 96.26% (95% CI 79.7–112.8) |
| Hit frequency | 25% · every 4.01 |
| Dead streak max / avg | 32 / 3.98 |
| Median hit | 0.90x |
| Max win (base game) | 365.9x · spin 990 |
| Free spins, natural | 31 · every 322.6 spins · mean 81.0x |
| Balance start → end | 100,000 → 99,253 |
Play Fire Portals demo
same math as real play · demo balance
Bonus buy lab
50 buys × 100x · USD 200 eachmean 0.57x · median 0.31x · 45 of 50 below price · best 5.34x · worst 0.03x
| Spins per bonus (avg / min–max) | 10.1 / 10–12 |
| Retriggered | 0% |
| Bonuses that paid nothing | 0% |
- Spent
- USD 10,00050 × USD 200
- Returned
- USD 5,71957.19% · CI95 32–82%
- Net
- −USD 4,281−21.4 buys
- Break-even or better
- 5 / 5010%
- Paid 2× price or more
- 2 / 504%
- Price in base spins
- 100natural trigger every ~323 spins
One buy costs the same as 100 base spins. Natural bonuses arrived once per 323 spins in this run and paid an average of 81.0x the bet; bought bonuses averaged 57x the bet. These are different entry costs, not a prediction of which route will pay more.
Risk profile
how much bankroll this run needed| 50 bets | bust at spin 71 |
| 100 bets | bust at spin 155 |
| 200 bets | bust at spin 301 |
One run, one bet size. A different session can bust earlier or never; treat this as a measured example, not a rule.
How it plays
7 rules screens from the game
Fire Portals pays connected blocks on a seven-by-seven board. At least five identical symbols must touch through their horizontal or vertical edges; a diagonal meeting does not join two groups. Winning symbols disappear, replacements fall in and any resulting blocks are paid before the round closes. The book is the scatter and does not disappear with an ordinary winning block.
A winning block with no portal creates one in its area after the symbols explode. This wild substitutes for paying symbols and begins at 1x. Its value contributes to any winning block using that position, then increases by one for each winning combination that used it. After the explosion it can move one position within the winning area, staying through the remaining tumbles of that paid spin.
When a block contains several portals, the payout uses their current combined values. The later merger is a separate step: after the win is paid, the updated portal values multiply together to form one wild. Purchase 4 shows this distinction clearly: 1 plus 322 gave a 323x payout factor, while the updated values of 2 and 323 formed a 646x portal. If competing combinations share wilds, the merger gives priority to the group containing more wilds, then to the higher-paying symbol; no portal can exceed 2,500x.
The books open free spins with three or more scatters. Three, four, five, six and seven award ten, twelve, fourteen, sixteen and eighteen spins respectively. The same scatter counts add those amounts again when they land during the feature. Existing portals from the triggering spin carry into the bonus, where portals remain across spins until the feature finishes.
At USD 2 per ordinary spin, the direct-entry button asks for USD 200: one hundred stakes. The bought trigger can land three to seven books, so a longer opening award is possible without a retrigger. With Ante selected, the screen asks for USD 2.50 instead of USD 2 and increases the number of bonus symbols on the reels, with purchases then unavailable. Both statistical series here used the ordinary USD 2 setting, with Ante off.
Marked as high volatility, this build allows stakes from USD 0.20 up to USD 300, including Ante settings. Its theoretical returns are 96.06% for ordinary play, 96.00% with Ante and 96.01% for purchases. The round stops on reaching its win ceiling, cancelling unused features; at the tested ordinary setting that ceiling is 10,000x. Configured RTP describes the game profile, rather than an individual test outcome.
Cluster pays
Cascading reels
Wild symbol
Multiplier
Scatter symbol
Free spins
Retrigger
Bonus buy
Extra bet
Bet range 0.20 – 300 per spin · payouts read from the game's paytable at bet 2.00
Gallery
6 frames from the test
Verdict
who it suits, who should skip itPurchase 10 finished with a 1,768x portal still on the board. Two clusters had just paid USD 663, bringing the feature total to USD 759.80, before the updated portal values merged. Every subsequent response through the end of the feature paid zero. The largest merged portal in the test therefore contributed nothing after it was created.
The purchase ledger was dominated by its two largest entries: number 4 paid USD 1,068.10 and number 10 paid USD 759.80. Only three other purchases covered the USD 200 cost. Against a USD 62.70 median, the smallest payment was USD 6 on purchase 12. None of the fifty features retriggered; longer starts came from their initial scatter awards.
Ordinary play produced the test's largest stake multiple without free spins: round 990 returned USD 731.80, or 365.9x, over twelve steps. The complete 10,000-round sample returned 96.26%, close to its 96.06% setting, although its 95% interval stretched from 79.70% to 112.83%. That near match does not make a short session predictable. The simulated 200-stake budget had already failed on round 301, before the first natural feature on 377.
The balance eventually finished USD 747.30 below its start, after a peak-to-trough decline of 990.7 stakes. There were 1,364 rounds between the bonuses on 2260 and 3625, despite ordinary clusters paying within that gap. Fire Portals offers an unusually visible multiplier calculation to study in the demo; the purchase ledger also shows how little that growing machinery sometimes returned for its entry price.
- The current payout and the later merged multiplier can be checked separately in the saved responses
- The largest ordinary-play round reached 365.9x without waiting for a bonus
- Existing portals carry from the triggering spin into free spins
- Forty-five purchases left part of their USD 200 cost unrecovered
- No purchased feature earned a retrigger in this fifty-entry sample
- A near-profile measured RTP still came with a 990.7-stake drawdown
- Round 8560 returned 200.5x in only three steps. A fifteen-symbol helmet cluster with two 1x portals supplied USD 400 of its USD 401 payout.
- The longest completely blank stretch covered rounds 7563 through 7594: 32 consecutive stakes with nothing returned. The much longer gap between natural bonuses still contained ordinary wins.
- Of 2,495 rounds that paid something, 1,304 paid less than the USD 2 stake. The 24.95% hit rate therefore includes many losing rounds.
- The natural feature on 513 returned USD 633.30. One thirteen-symbol hourglass cluster, helped by 1x, 3x and 22x portals, paid USD 520 of that total.
Method & data
open data · closed rig10000 base-game spins at a fixed USD 2.0 bet; 50 bonus buys at 200.0 each (100.0x) on the official Pragmatic Play demo server (jurisdiction 99, RTP profile 96.06%); every request and response logged; test run 2026-09-10.
The test rig recorded every round on the official demo server. Screenshots and video were captured in a separate browser session and are not part of the statistical samples. This release has completed automated data, content and page checks; human editorial review is pending. How we test →
| 2026-09-10 | 10,000 spins · RTP 96.3% |
FAQ
5 questions · answered from the logDo merged portal values change the win already paid?
No. A winning cluster is settled with the portal values that contributed to it. The wilds then grow and merge, creating a factor for later combinations. The rules example above follows both stages of purchase 4; purchase 10 shows the other possibility, where a large new portal remained unused until the feature ended.
Can a portal help more than one symbol group at once?
Yes. Its value applies to each qualifying group that contains it. That also means it can gain more than one increment during a tumble. When shared portals could merge through different groups, the rules first favour the group with more wilds, then the higher-paying symbol.
Will buying free spins preserve the portals from my previous spin?
Portals persist through a paid round and carry into a feature triggered within that round. An ordinary round that has ended does not leave its portals waiting for a later purchase. The purchased feature has its own trigger and subsequent board.
Does a twelve-spin purchase mean the bonus retriggered?
Four books can award twelve spins at the start. A retrigger requires another qualifying scatter event during the feature. We checked the initial awards separately and found no retriggers among these fifty purchases.
Was the 57.19% purchase return the game's advertised RTP?
It was the measured result of spending USD 10,000 on fifty USD 200 entries and receiving USD 5,719. The captured rules set the purchase profile at 96.01%. Fifty results, including a USD 6 low and a USD 1,068.10 high, give a limited sample of that profile.
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Field notes
0 notes