Oriental themed online pokies are quite popular and the Chinese New Year is the perfect occasion to release one. You can tell that Dragon Dance pokie is related to the Chinese New Year because of the red lanterns in the background. These are used by the Chinese during the New Year to keep the beast Nian away. The high paying symbols depict the various festivities. The top payouts are awarded by the dragon dancer and lion dancer. These symbols start paying from two-of-a-kind combinations and show lively win animations. Other symbols based on the theme are Chinese couple, drum beater and girl playing cymbals. The low paying symbols are playing card icons with Chinese patterns, which are a Microgaming trademark. The Dragon Dance logo is the wild symbol. It appears only on reels 2 and 4 and some players will be disappointed. But you cannot have everything in every online pokie. The fire cracker is the scatter symbol.
Dragon Dance has two gaming features. The first is the free spins feature that is triggered by landing three or more scatter firecracker symbols anywhere on the reels in the same spin. You will be awarded 15 free spins irrespective of the number of scatters in the trigger. The payouts are multiplied three times and the feature can be retriggered. The second is the Microgaming Respin feature. It introduces an element of interactive skill in the online pokie. At the end of every spin, you will see a Respin value displayed below each reel. If you pay this value for a particular reel, then you will spin only that reel keeping all other reels fixed. You can go for Respins as many times as you want, but will have to pay the cost each time. The skill lies in judging whether the possible, not guaranteed, payout is worth the cost. All Australian online casinos will allow you to play Dragon Dance in the demo mode. If you have not played the Respin feature in other online pokies, then you can try it for free and understand how it works.
Dragon Dance offers the 243 ways to win paylines structure, which is very popular at Australian online casinos. You have two betting choices to make. You select the number of coins per payline from 1 to 10 and the coin size from AU$0.01 to AU$5.00. Being a 243 ways online pokie, the total bet is the line bet multiplied by 25. The maximum total bet with this configuration works out to AU$1250. Even the highest of high rollers cannot hope for something more than this. The maximum line payout for the lion dancer symbol is 4,000 times the line bet. If you have bet the maximum then the payout will be AU$200,000. In the free spins the maximum payout will become AU$600,000. The maximum scatter payout is 100 times the total bet, which at maximum bet works out to AU$125,000. Microgaming reports a payout percentage around 97.5% and variable volatility.