Santa Paws, the mobile slot that Golden Riviera launched for Christmas 2014

This article was first published in December 2014, when Golden Riviera Mobile (the telephone version of Golden Riviera Casino) announced a Christmas slot by Microgaming called Santa Paws for Monday, 1 December 2014. The release is kept in the past tense, as a record of how a casino sold a seasonal game to players only beginning to play on a telephone.

What the casino announced

The release called the game "the perfect stocking filler" and promised entertainment to players who were "looking to begin their Christmas celebrations early", with a snowy landscape and "friendly animal characters" in place of the usual fruit and sevens. Whether a player had been "naughty or nice" made no difference, it added: the releases of that period allowed themselves one such joke per text.

The casino's manager and spokesperson, Max Stern, was quoted with a "ho, ho, ho, happy holidays" and the forecast that the slot would be "great for December and rewarding any time of the year". We report the words only as part of the record of that December. A manager who praises his own game proves nothing about it, and the players of 2014 were asked to take him at his word.

How the game was built

Santa Paws was a five-reel slot with twenty "paylines" (fixed lines on which the symbols had to align, unlike the 243 "ways to win" of the other Microgaming titles of those months), with up to twelve free spins and a "mystery multiplier" between two and seven applied to them. The release also promised "a chance to win even more at a later point" (its words), a phrase that it never explained.

The jackpots were given as 20,000.00 in the base game and 140,000.00 during the free spins, figures without a currency (in coins, presumably), and the second is simply the first multiplied by seven, which is the top of the mystery multiplier. A player who read the two numbers side by side saw a game seven times richer; a player who did the division saw the same game with its best multiplier attached.

Thirty games on a telephone

The mobile casino counted "more than 30" games in December 2014, a figure that reads strangely today, when a telephone opens the same catalogue as a desktop. The release dressed it with the guarantees that every text of that period carried: Microgaming as "the world leader in gaming software", "payouts players can trust", the eCOGRA seal and the "128-bit encryption" of the banking pages (an industry standard, it said). Support was "open 24/7" by live chat, e-mail and toll-free number.

None of those claims was checked at the time, and none is checked here, because the page is a record and not a review; what a seal certified in 2014 (the fairness of the games and the payout reports) said nothing about the terms of the bonuses, then as now, and the distinction is still the first thing to keep in mind when you read a casino's page.

The welcome offer, with the casino's own examples

The mobile casino offered the same package as the desktop, up to $1,400 over three deposits (figures that the casino quoted in euro as well): 100 per cent up to $150 on the first, 25 per cent up to $500 on the second and 50 per cent up to $750 on the third. The release, unusually, gave its own worked examples, and they are worth reading twice.

A player who deposited $150 played with $300, the release said; one who deposited $2,000 played with $2,500, and one who deposited $1,500 played with $2,250. Add the three deposits and the player who took the whole $1,400 had put $3,650 of his or her own money, a figure that the casino's examples contained without ever writing it down!

The "wagering" (the volume of bets required before a withdrawal) was not in the release at all. The reader learnt how much to deposit and nothing about how much to bet before withdrawing, which was then, as it is today, the figure that decides whether a bonus is worth taking: if you read one number on a bonus page, read that one.

What became of it

Golden Riviera belonged to the group known as Vegas Partner Lounge (with Crazy Vegas, Maple Casino and Casino-Mate), and it is not among the operators we work with today. Its old address hosts, at the time of writing, a site of casino listings and not a casino, and the separate "mobile casino" of 2014 has disappeared as a product, since every casino now runs in the browser of the telephone. The offer above no longer exists in any form.

The images on this page link to Platinum Play, a Microgaming casino of the same years and of another group, which is still among those we present (the link is an affiliate link, as the box above says). The package described here was not its own, and its current terms are in our Platinum Play review, written after trying the casino in demo mode.

Microgaming's games passed to Games Global between 2021 and 2022 (our article on Microgaming becoming Apricot tells the story), and we have not checked whether Santa Paws survives today. If you are looking for free spins offered now, our free spins page explains their terms with examples, the slot hub gathers the games we have played in demo, and the news archive keeps the other releases of those years.

By the Online-Casinos.ws editorial team · Online since 2002 · Last updated: 9 October 2026