This simple slot uses a design almost as old as slot machines themselves, with the most valuable symbols represented by fruits.

The use of fruits as symbols stems from an even earlier type of game that offered flavored gums as prizes. The cherry and melon fruits represented some of the flavors of gum. Fortunately, Fruit Shop adds in some of the more modern aspects of video slots as well.

Fruit Shop Slot Layout

There is no more typical video slot layout than the one used in Fruit Shop, featuring five reels with three visible symbols on each.

The symbols include five fruits, in order of value: cherries, plums, lemons, oranges and watermelons. Rounding out the batch are the playing card ranks from 10 to Ace.

Fruit Shop Paytable

Lining up 5 cherries yields the highest payout on the game at 2000X your bet. With the assistance of the wild symbol which doubles winning combination, this can reach 4000X.

Fruit Shop Wild Symbol

The wild symbol in the game is a Fruit Shop logo. In addition to matching any of the symbols, the wild symbol also doubles the payout of any winning combination that uses it.

The Bonus Feature – Free Spins

The real action in Fruit Shop happens when you trigger the free spins. Unlike most slots that use a special symbol to trigger the bonus round, in Fruit Shop you merely need to line up some of the fruit symbols in a winning payline.

Depending on the symbol and the number of them in the winning combination, you can win from one to five free spins. Here I triggered one free spin by getting three cherries in a row.

You can tell when you are in the free spins because the background changes to yellow, and a countdown appears at the top right. All wins during free spins are awarded at 2X the payout.

During the bonus spins, it gets easier to trigger additional free spins. The same combinations of fruits will trigger more spins, but also now any winning combination of the playing card ranks will also retrigger more free spins.

Once you’re done with all the spins accrued, you’ll get a quick summary.

Fruit Shop is simple and classic video slot, which can be a refreshing respite from the trend toward increasing complexity in slot games. Sure, I enjoy playing a game like Epic Monopoly II with its rich set of bonus rounds, but it can be a little overwhelming to try to figure out what you won, and why!

Fruit Shop is a real back-to-the-basics pleasure. Sometimes simple is good.

I’ll leave you with one final memory of mine which dates from my very first trip to Las Vegas in the 1980s. My friend and I were wandering through the casino and passed a pair of women playing on adjacent slots with a fruit theme. As we passed by, we were just in time to see one woman point at her screen and tell the other, in a thick Midwest accent: “If that woulda been a watermelon, I woulda won.” That kind of sums up a lot of slot play.

My friend and I used that as our inside joke for the rest of our trip. No matter what game we were playing, when we narrowly missed winning something we would complain that “If that woulda been a watermelon, I woulda won.”

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