Shark Bounty, a July 2024 game from PG Soft, has no reels to read from left to right. Seven or more matching symbols anywhere on its 6x5 grid make a win, and the real money comes from a pairing: a fisherman worth one bet and a shark carrying a multiplier. When both are on the board at the end of a spin, the fisherman's value is multiplied by the shark's. In my 100 demo spins that pairing produced the three best results, the largest 195.00 on a 12.00 bet.
United States
Shark Bounty available at Cafe Casino
Same game, real money
Cafe Casino runs the same Shark Bounty with the same math and adds a welcome bonus for players from the United States:
300% up to $2,000 + 150 FS 18+ · T&Cs apply · the demo stays free
Seven of a kind, anywhere
The grid has six columns and five rows, 30 positions in all. A symbol pays when at least seven copies are on the board at the same time; positions do not matter. Winning symbols explode, new ones fall in, and the cascade goes on until no group of seven is left.
The base bet is fixed at 20. At my 12.00 (0.30 on level 2) every number in the table below is worth 0.60 in the demo currency.
| Symbol | 7-8 | 11-12 | 15-16 | 28-30 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tuna | 20 | 100 | 1,000 | 20,000 |
| Red snapper | 15 | 50 | 400 | 10,000 |
| Angelfish | 10 | 30 | 100 | 4,000 |
| Tackle box, pliers, lure | 5 | 20 | 80 | 2,000 |
| Spade, club, heart, diamond | 3 | 10 | 40 | 1,000 |
The ladder is steep at the bottom: seven tuna pay 12.00, one stake, and seven of a card suit 1.80. A group of fifteen is already a large win, and I never saw one. Most of my winning spins paid between 1.80 and 10.00.
Hunters and sharks
Two special symbols sit outside the paytable.
- The hunter, a fisherman in a red cap, can land in any base spin. His value always equals the current bet, 12.00 for me.
- A shark is added to the board for every winning combination in a round, with a value from 1x to 50x. If five or more sharks are on the board when the cascade stops, they merge into one Mega Shark carrying the sum.
At the end of the spin, if hunters and sharks are both present, the game pays the hunters' total multiplied by the sharks' total. Without a hunter a shark pays nothing, and without a shark a hunter pays nothing.
Spin 21: two hunters and an 8x shark
A small cascade paid 3.00 and left a single shark marked 8x in the corner. Two hunters had landed at the top of the grid, worth 12.00 each.
The pair was worth 24.00 and the shark made it 192.00; adding the 3.00 cascade, the game announced a Mega Win of 195.00, about 16 stakes. Spin 64 took a different route to a similar number: four small sharks, 2x, 1x, 2x and 1x, collected over several rounds and summed to 6x.
The two hunters were again worth 24.00, and 24.00 × 6 = 144.00, which with 8.40 of cascade wins gave 152.40. That was one shark short of a merge. Spin 46 got there: five sharks of 1x each combined into a single Mega Shark worth 5x, and one hunter turned it into 60.00, for 70.20 with the cascade. Spin 31 paid 61.80 the same way, one hunter and a 5x shark.
Free spins and the hunter collector
The free spins open on three boat scatters, ten of them, with two extra spins for every boat past the third. Hunters that land during the round are stored in a bar under the grid, and every four collected give five more free spins and raise the hunter's value for the rest of the round: 2x the bet after four, 3x after eight, 5x after twelve, 10x after sixteen, and another 10x for every four after that.
My round arrived on spin 91 after a 13.80 cascade. The collector bar never reached its fourth slot, so the hunters stayed at 12.00 and no extra spins were added. The ten spins paid 100.20, and spin 91 came to 114.00.
Catch report
The session ended at 99,664.00, a loss of 336.00: 864.00 came back on 1,200.00. Thirty-eight of the 100 spins paid. Hunter and shark pairings paid 195.00, 152.40, 70.20 and 61.80 on spins 21, 64, 46 and 31, and the free spins brought 114.00; those five spins made up 593.40 of the return. The remaining 33 wins added 270.60, and the most common figure among them was 1.80, the price of seven card symbols.
| Feature | Specification |
|---|---|
| Provider | PG Soft |
| Released | July 2024 |
| Grid | 6 x 5, pays anywhere for 7+ of a kind, cascades |
| Base bet | 20, bet in the demo 0.60 to 180.00 |
| Sharks | 1x to 50x, one per winning combination; 5+ merge |
| Hunters | Worth 1x the bet; paid times the sharks' total |
| Free spins | 10 for 3 scatters, +2 per extra; hunter upgrades every 4 collected |
| RTP | 96.75% |
| Max win | 5,000x the bet |
The RTP and the 5,000x limit are taken from PG Soft. For a sea theme with an ordinary reel layout, Mermaid Riches builds its board as a staircase of one to five rows.
All the PG Soft demos I have tested are on the home page.