New Slots Round Up: 12th September – 18th September 2026

The 3-pot slot epidemic continues this week, with studios still seemingly determined to put them on our screens. Fortunately, at least a couple of them are actually doing something interesting with the format.

We start with one of those in Pots of Power: Dragon’s Blessing. It’s from AvatarUX and is built on a 5 x 5 grid, with 25 paylines and a 10,000x maximum win. The 96.05% RTP is fairly standard, while the main thing that stands out in the base game is the ability to choose between ‘Normal’ and ‘Insane’ volatility. You’ll also be working towards the bonus round, which is based around the game’s 3-pot concept, but thankfully, this is a little different from the usual played-out hold & win format.

Here, the Red, Yellow, and Blue Dragons each provide a roaming frame, moving around the grid on every spin of the bonus round and conferring different benefits on the Coins within their reach. Landing Upgrade Symbols for each colour of frame can also increase the sizes to 2 x 2, 3 x 3, and beyond, allowing them to cover more of the grid and affect more Coins. It’s a fun spin on the 3-pot concept, and a rare game of this type that I actually enjoyed.

Delulu Gaming has been building some hype as a new studio. Its first few games, including Candy Chaos and MLK Voyage, have had positive reviews and Toy Crush is another fun one. In fact, it’s not too dissimilar from our Game of the Week, which we’ll get into later. But essentially, forming cluster wins fills up a meter with 4 sections, and when you fill each section you get a different power-up.

The 4 power-ups are Disruption, Transformation, Separation, and Elimination, each affecting symbols on the grid in a different way and potentially causing further cluster wins. Then, if you manage to fill the whole meter up, you’ll trigger a bonus round where each of the 4 power-ups play out, then a Giant 3 x 3 Wild lands. You can also get into this round with 3 or more Scatters. It’s another solid entry into Delulu’s catalog with a nice 20,000x max win to aim for.

We’ve had the 40, 20, and 10 versions of Power Joker from AvatarUX, and now we have the 5-payline version (5 Power Joker), this time played on a smaller 3 x 3 grid. Did we need this? Probably not.

Next is Red Hot Chilli Chickens by BGaming, another 3-pot slot, where perhaps the most notable thing is its cartoon theme – 3 chickens who really don’t want to be turned into KFC…

Chickens are clearly on BGaming’s mind right now, as Johnny vs Chicken also releases this week. This one features Johnny Cash, the gun-toting pickle, alongside a chicken from Chicken Rush, although the resulting slot doesn’t really borrow any mechanics from those original games. Instead, we get a VS Reels-type mechanic – a concept we’ve seen in Duel at Dawn and other Hacksaw games – with Johnny facing off against the chicken to determine which multiplier lands on the Expanded Wild. The 97% RTP is decent here – a figure BGaming often offers – and this game has a fun, colorful look to it, even if the mechanics are ideas we’ve seen many times before.

3 Pots of Potions Bewitched Bonus Pot 20,000 from Gaming Corps wins the prize for most unwieldy title in recent memory and adds another 3-pot game to this week’s slate (and we’re still not done). In fact, it’s a sequel to 3 Pots of Potions Bonus Pot from around this time last year, but just with more AI art, a higher max win (20,000x), and a lower RTP (95.45%).

Next, BGaming brings us its second IP combination title, as Bonanza Billion Merge Up pulls together the worlds of Bonanza Billion and…Merge Up. Bonanza Billion is essentially a Sweet Bonanza clone, while Merge Up is a little more creative, with its cluster wins and symbols that level up through a fixed progression on each win.

That means that in this new portmanteau game, winning symbols no longer simply tumble away – instead, they condense into a single, higher-value symbol. It’s a neat idea, but unfortunately not as much of a game changer as I’d hoped. I’ve always found Bonanza Billion/Sweet Bonanza fairly boring, and this new combination just erases the fun of Merge Up, bringing it down to Bonanza Billion’s level.

Star Pigs of the Clusterverse expands on Gaming Corps’ 3 Pigs series, transporting the pigs to space in this cluster wins slot. I’m not sure you could technically call this a 3-pot slot though – the 3 porkers here actually show up on the grid as Star Pig Wilds, so rather than being the doorway to 3 different flavours of hold & win round, they act as Wilds to help form clusters.

Then, each time one successfully contributes to a win, it unleashes its special power on the resulting Coins, with Boost, Collect, and Multi effects available. It’s actually a pretty fun twist on the 3 Pigs formula, and I’d probably be more positive about it if the stats weren’t quite so underwhelming at 95.80% RTP and 5,000x maximum win.

However, we can’t escape generic 3-pot games for long, with BGaming’s 3 Lucky Monkeys bringing us back to the most played-out concept of 2026. With Expand, Collect, and Boost as the 3 features, there’s really nothing new here at all.

What about 4 Lucky Nuggets from Popiplay? Well, this follows on from 3 Lucky Nuggets earlier in the year, which was a 3-pot slot – or was it a 2-pot, because 1 of the pots was actually a combination of the other 2? So, depending on how you look at it, 4 Lucky Nuggets is either a 4-pot slot or a 3-pot with another combo feature. Confused? You don’t need to be – you can just skip this.

Peter & Sons began the popular Barbarossa series in 2023 with Barbarossa DoubleMax. In fact, you might say this was the start of the studio’s most notable series. Now, after Barbarossa Revenge and then Barbarossa Dragon Empire, we have Barbarossa: Beyond the Edge. The general concept remains the same: land wins on 243 paylines (all ways pays), while Chain Multipliers double with each consecutive win: 2x, 4x, 8x, 16x, and so on, with no upper limit.

As we’ve come to expect from this Armenia-based studio, the slot looks great, with its distinctive art style scoring kudos. The main upgrade here is the addition of a Mystery Ball, which can suddenly increase the Chain Multiplier by 3x, 5x, or 10x. For a lot of players, this could be the best slot this week, but because it’s ultimately a tweaked update of an existing game and series, we’ve reserved the Game of the Week spot for something a little more fresh (but similarly pirate-themed).

Gaming Corps’ 3 Pots of Potions IP makes another appearance on this week’s list, this time in an Instant Blitz format. We’ve had a few games in this style over the last few months, and while it’s a neat little combination of slots and bingo, this time integrated with the 3-pot concept, the demo version of 3 Pots of Potions Instant Blitz that I played felt a little slow and buggy. And once again, the stats aren’t exactly helping, with a 95.99% RTP and a 2,000x maximum win.

Nuclear Tumble is the first release in Relax Gaming‘s loose Tumble series in a while. This group includes hits like Templar Tumble and Ancient Tumble, with the general idea being that there are both paying and non-paying (Blocker) symbols on the board, while wins are formed using an all ways pays system. Of course, there’s a tumbling element too.

Nuclear Tumble is set in some sort of post-apocalyptic world, with a cartoon bear serving as the main character. There are a few special features to keep things interesting, including Cash Prize symbols, which are collected when they reach the bottom row of the grid. There’s also a Bomb symbol, which explodes at the end of the tumble sequence, destroying everything in a cross shape while leaving Cash Prize symbols untouched. Again, the stats aren’t the greatest here, with a 96.00% RTP and 5,000x maximum win, but it’s another competent slot from Relax.

We round out this section with another new slot from Peter & Sons: Inks & Pints. Even by this studio’s standards, the art here is strange and unique, with an Irish pub/tattoo studio setting featuring leprechauns drinking and a red-haired maiden sitting for a back tattoo. Wins land on a 5 x 3 grid with 10 paylines, while Pint Wilds can land on the middle 3 reels, then expand to fill them and trigger a respin. Overall, the base game is fairly simple, but things get considerably more interesting in the Bonus Wheel Game.

You start on the outside ring, which is 1 of 4, and progress towards the centre by landing on the ‘Up’ segment, while hitting ‘End’ brings the round to a close. The further you progress, the bigger the multiplier prizes become, eventually reaching multis in the hundreds and then thousands.

I feel like I don’t fully get the theme, and the art style is strange and sometimes a little hard to make out, but the 4-stage wheel progression is an interesting twist on the usual bonus format. It’s certainly a Peter & Sons game that offers something a little different.

Now onto our Game of the Week below.

Game of the Week

Dead Man’s Crew from Slotmill is just plain fun! With a 96.07% RTP and 10,000x max win, it’s fairly average in the stats department, but watching all the different mechanics unfold within its colorful pirate theme is what makes it stand out.

The base game uses cluster pays on a 6 x 6 board, giving plenty of space for wins of 5 or more matching symbols to form. These are often assisted by the Wild Scatter, which increases its multiplier by 1 whenever it’s involved in a winning cluster.

Then there are the Crew features, which remind me of the various power-ups of Gems Bonanza, particularly because they’re triggered by landing a win on a highlighted square. These ‘Feature Hotspots’ reset randomly on each spin, and if you manage to land a win on one, the Crew features you can trigger are:

• Transform: Changes every instance of a particular symbol into another.
• Symbol Removal: Removes every instance of a particular symbol from the grid.
• Mystery Trail: Makes a beeline towards an end goal, transforming every symbol it passes through into the same symbol.
• Wild Spawn: Converts itself and up to 2 other symbols into Wild Scatters.
• Hotspot Generator: Converts itself and up to 3 other symbols into Feature Hotspots.
• Wild Booster: Adds 1 to the multiplier of every Wild Scatter on the grid.
• Wild Doubler: Doubles the multiplier of every Wild Scatter on the grid.

Because the game uses tumbling reels, new symbols drop into the spaces created by the Crew features, giving you further chances to trigger wins and set off more effects.

To reach the free spins takes some effort (you need to land 3 or more Wild Scatters in the same spin), but once triggered (or bought), the Wild Scatters remain on the grid for the entire feature, meaning their multipliers can build to some pretty high levels.

Dead Man’s Crew is one of those slots that’s genuinely enjoyable to watch, with its different features constantly changing the board and creating new patterns of wins. Add in Slotmill’s usual slick presentation and you’ve got a game that’s easy to get lost in for a while.

In short, this might not rewrite the rulebook, and it may rely on once-in-a-blue-moon big wins to keep your balance topped up, but its combination of visually-satisfying mechanics and ace presentation makes it an entertaining slot to play.

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