Money Train

Money Train is a Relax Gaming slot released in 2019, and the game that turned a mid-sized studio into the owner of one of the most influential bonus formats in online slots. On the surface it is a 5×4, 40-payline Wild West heist game with stacked outlaw symbols; in practice, everything that matters happens in the Money Cart, the respin bonus that the whole Money Train series is built around. The stated theoretical RTP is 96.20%, and the win cap is 20,000x the bet.

The base game plays traditionally: symbols pay left to right on 40 fixed lines, a wild substitutes everywhere, and the top outlaw pays 20x the bet for five on a line. Landing bonus symbols on reels 1, 3, and 5 opens the Money Cart. Third-party databases rate the game highly volatile; Relax does not publish an official volatility figure in the rules.

The Money Cart Bonus

The bonus swaps the reels for a grid of independent positions and 3 respins. Every symbol that lands is a cash value expressed as a bet multiplier, and every new symbol resets the counter to 3. The specials define the round: the Payer adds its value to every other symbol, the Collector sweeps every visible value into itself, and their Persistent versions repeat that action on every following spin. The Widener opens an additional reel, up to two per round, and the worthless Tumbleweed lands without resetting the counter. When the spins run out, the sum of every visible value is paid.

Feature Buy

The Money Cart can be bought for 80x the bet, the cheapest entry in the series, and the rules state a remarkable 98.00% theoretical RTP for the bought bonus, nearly two points above the base game. Where the option is available, it is one of the best-priced buys of its era.

Money Train vs the Series

Reading the original against its sequels shows how deliberately the franchise escalated. Money Train 2 opened the trigger to any three positions, added the Sniper and Necromancer, and multiplied the cap; the third game piled on Tommy Guns and tiered buys; the fourth rebuilt the board entirely; the fifth put the whole cart on rails. What none of them kept is this game’s restraint: the fixed reels 1-3-5 trigger, a roster of just seven bonus behaviours, and a buy priced below 100x. The Origins edition later returned to this exact chassis for its jackpot version, a quiet acknowledgement of how sturdy the first draft was.

Money Train Review

Played today, Money Train feels like a prototype of its own franchise, and that is precisely its historical value. The persistent-symbol respin round it introduced, values that snowball through collectors and payers rather than through reel wins, has been copied across the industry and iterated four more times by Relax itself. The original round is small by later standards: fewer specials, a 20,000x cap, no snipers or necromancers. But the pacing still works, the 80x buy at 98% RTP remains unusually player-friendly, and the game is the right place to understand what every later Money Cart is elaborating on. As a piece of slot history, it has aged into required playing.