Boom Pirates

Boom Pirates comes from Foxium, a studio that's spent years building its design chops within a wider network of partner developers, and this release marks a genuine step up in ambition — reportedly delayed by close to a year in development, which tracks given the scale of what's on offer here. Built on a base 5-reel, 4-row grid with 1,024 ways to win, the game uses a mechanic branded Wonderways, which expands rows dynamically and can push the total ways to win as high as 10,077,696 in its fully extended state — numbers that put Boom Pirates squarely in the same conversation as the biggest expanding-grid slots on the market.

The theme is a well-worn favourite done well: a tropical pirate island rendered in warm, inviting shades of blue, complete with an atmospheric pirate soundtrack running underneath the action. On the reels, royal-value symbols from 10 through to Ace fill the lower tier, while five higher-value picture symbols — gunpowder barrels, cannons, colourful parrots and a tattooed pirate character among them — carry the bulk of the game's payout potential.

Two standout features drive the action beyond the base Wonderways expansion. The Boom Pirate feature randomly activates extra rows and reels mid-spin, pushing the ways to win higher on the fly, while Mary's Swashbuckling Attack can randomly convert an otherwise losing spin into a five-of-a-kind winning combination — a rare and genuinely exciting mechanic that adds unpredictability to spins that would normally just pass by unnoticed.

Numerically, Boom Pirates carries an RTP of 96.19%, comfortably above the 96% benchmark, paired with a medium-to-high volatility rating that splits the difference between steady engagement and bigger, less frequent swings. The maximum win is capped at 3,800x stake — solid, if not table-topping for a Wonderways-style game of this scale — and betting runs from 0.20 up to 50 per spin, giving reasonable flexibility across stake sizes.

Boom Pirates represents a genuine leap forward for Foxium as a studio, backing up an appealing pirate theme with mechanical ambition that matches the scale of its ways-to-win ceiling. The combination of a randomly expanding grid and a feature that can rescue a losing spin gives every round two separate reasons to stay engaged, rather than leaning on a single bonus trigger to carry the whole experience.