Lucky Irish Scratch Card
As instant win games go, Lucky Irish is about as stereotypical as a name and theme gets. Before it even loads you already know the sort of symbols you’re going to find on the grid, the same ones that festoon all such online slots and instant win games. Four-leaf clovers? You bet. Gold-plated four-leaf clovers? Oh yes. All the cliches and memes are present and accounted for here including pots of gold and little green pipe-smoking leprechauns. No, Bally Wulff’s online Lucky Irish game isn’t subtle, but that’s not to say it’s a disappointment. This is a game which has been cleanly designed, with a lightweight framework and smart graphics. This might be an Irish-themed game, but it’s one of the smartest looking games within this crowded genre.
Although meant to be mobile-compatible, Lucky Irish struggles to load in the Chrome browser. This is because there appear to be Flash-based elements involved. As a consequence, iPhone users are out of luck if they’re hoping to be able to put the free Lucky Irish game through its paces. If you can get it to work though you’ll find this to be a scratch card that loads quickly and which doesn’t feel bloated in any way. The background features a simple image of green hills, drawing your focus to the board where your fortune will be made on the nine green clovers that make up the 3x3 grid.
Quick Wins?
In the playing guide that comes tucked within one of the game’s submenus, Bally Wulff describe Lucky Irish as “an exciting 3x3 scratch card game in which you can prove that you have a lucky hand”. All you have to do is match three identical symbols to win. It wounds simple, but revealing those high value symbols ain’t easy. If it was, everyone would be profiting from this online casino game and then walking away several hundred or even thousand coins richer.
The stated RTP for Lucky Irish is 85.2%. If you’re accustomed to playing online slots this may seem extremely stingy, but it’s par for the course with scratch cards, where the return to player tends to be markedly lower. There are technically 10 different symbols that can appear on the grid, but visually there are only three: a green clover, a pot of gold coins and a pot of gold coins with some clover thrown in there for good measure. The lowest sum you can win from the game is 0.25 and the highest stands at 44,444, which happens when you match three clover/gold pots.
Scratch That Itch
There are two ways to play Lucky Irish, just as there are with most of these sorts of games: by scratching off the panels manually or by doing it automatically. The end result is the same, but you may deem it to be more exciting when you reveal each panel in turn. Hover your cursor over each symbol or click on Scratch All. There are 3,000,000 possible cards, so you’ll have to play a whole lot of Lucky Irish before you see the same layout twice. By default your stake is set at 0.6 per game. There doesn’t appear to be a way to adjust this; not in demo mode at least, and there’s no information contained in the paytable or playing guide that references there being a means of wagering more.
Any time you match three symbols on the grid, they’ll be illuminated and will start spinning, making it easy to tell where and how you’ve profited. One of the best things about Lucky Irish is that you can actually scratch off the card by holding down your cursor and moving it across the grid. Some scratch games simply reveal each square in its entirety when you click on it. Here, you get to play in a manner that’s more akin to scratching off a card you’d actually bought in a newsagent and revealed using a coin.
Lucky Irish – Our Verdict
There’s pros and there’s cons to playing Lucky Irish by Bally Wulff. On the one hand this is a game which offers nothing new and whose symbols and theme have been done to death. On the other hand, at least you know what to expect before you’ve even started and will have a very good idea of the sort of symbols you should be chasing down. Although there’s a playing guide provided, it’s all very straightforward. Due to the RTP that hovers around 85%, statistically you’re going to finish this game with less credits than you started out with. Then again, you could get lucky and scoop 44,444 coins on your first go. That’s the beauty of scratch cards: you never quite know what to expect.
