Money Train

Provider

Relax Gaming

Default RTP

96.2%

Volatility

High

Maximum win

20,000x

Core mechanic

Bonus buy

What Money Train is

Money Train is the 2019 Relax Gaming slot that launched the most commercially significant series in modern online slots. Return is 96.20%, volatility is high, and the maximum win is 20,000x your stake.

Its structure is simple to describe and was genuinely novel at the time: a thin base game whose only real purpose is to trigger the Money Cart respin round, where every payout in the game happens.

The series that changed the industry

It is difficult to overstate how much this game shaped what followed. Relax Gaming describes the Money Train series as its legendary line, and its influence runs through the entire market — the respin-collect format now appears in dozens of games from studios that had nothing like it before 2019.

Three specific things the series popularised:

• The bonus-only game. A base game that exists purely as a gate, with all meaningful maths in one round.
• Collector-and-payer symbols. Values on the grid harvested by a symbol that multiplies or gathers them.
• The prominent bonus buy. Not the first, but the game that made purchasing the feature a standard expectation.

The Money Cart respin round

Landing the bonus triggers Money Cart: the grid clears and you are given three respins. Any special symbol landing resets the respin counter to three. The round ends when the counter reaches zero or the grid fills entirely.

Everything you have collected is paid at the end.

That reset-on-landing structure is what makes the round tense. A round can end after three empty respins or run for dozens, and the difference between those two outcomes is enormous — which is precisely where the game's variance lives.

The special symbols

The round's depth comes from the variety of symbols that can land, each doing something different:

• Value symbols — carry a straightforward cash multiple of your stake.
• Collector — gathers the values of all symbols currently on the grid and adds them to itself.
• Payer — pays its own value to every other symbol on the grid.
• Persistent symbols — repeat their action on subsequent respins rather than acting once.
• Multiplier symbols — apply a multiplier to values they interact with.

Later entries in the series expanded this list considerably, but the original established the vocabulary.

Collector and Payer logic

Understanding these two is most of understanding the game, and the order matters more than people realise.

A Collector landing early, when the grid holds few values, gathers little. The same Collector landing late, on a full grid of accumulated values, gathers a great deal. Its worth is entirely a function of when it arrives.

A Payer works in reverse: it adds its value to everything present, so a Payer on a full grid multiplies the effect across many symbols at once.

The genuinely large rounds come from a specific sequence: values accumulate, Payers boost them, and a Collector arrives last to sweep everything. That ordering is random and cannot be influenced, which is why the round rewards patience rather than decisions — there are none to make.

The bonus buy that started an argument

Money Train made feature purchasing mainstream, and the consequences were regulatory as much as commercial.

Bonus buys are now prohibited in several regulated markets, including the UK, on the reasoning that paying a large multiple of stake for a single outcome accelerates losses and removes the natural pacing of a session. Whatever your view of that argument, the practical effect is that this game plays very differently depending on where you are.

Where buys are unavailable, Money Train is a thin base game waiting for an infrequent trigger. Where they are available, it is a game you can compress into repeated expensive rounds. The maths is the same; the experience is not remotely.

If buys are offered, convert the price to cash before tapping, and set a total purchase count for the session in advance.

The published numbers

Statistic	Figure
Return	96.20%
Maximum win	20,000x
Volatility	High
Bonus structure	Money Cart respins, three respins resetting on any symbol
Released	2019

Why the base game is so thin

Players regularly describe Money Train's base game as boring, and that is not a criticism the design would dispute — it is the intended structure.

When a game concentrates its entire return into one bonus round, the base game cannot also pay well. The 96.20% has to come from somewhere, and if the Money Cart holds most of it, ordinary spins necessarily hold very little.

That produces a specific and now very common session shape: long stretches of near-nothing, punctuated by a round that decides the session. Whether you enjoy that depends entirely on whether you find the waiting tolerable — and the industry's answer, judging by how many games now copy the format, is that plenty of people do.

Stake sizing in practice

• Budget 300 to 500 base spins if you are triggering naturally. That is the working guideline for Relax's extreme-volatility titles and it applies here.
• If you buy, count each purchase at its full spin equivalent and decide the total before you start.
• Do not read a filling grid as being close to something. Respins are independent.
• Take a large round off the table — a Collector arriving on a loaded grid will not repeat soon.
• Expect the base game to be dull. That is the design, not a dry spell.

Where the original sits now

Title	Return	Maximum win
Money Train (2019)	96.20%	20,000x
Money Train 2 (2020)	96.40%	50,000x
Money Train 3 (2022)	96.10%	100,000x
Money Train 4	96.16%	150,000x

The original now has the smallest ceiling in the family by a wide margin, and the second-best return. Its case is that 20,000x is the most reachable of the four — and on a series this volatile, a reachable ceiling is worth more than an enormous one.

Where this fits in a session

The original Money Train is the series entry point and, arguably, still the most sensible of the four for a normal bankroll. The ceiling is a fraction of the sequels' and the return is second-best in the family.

Budget 300 to 500 spins, accept the base game for what it is, and treat the Money Cart round as the entire game — because it is. If you find the waiting intolerable, the format is not going to improve in the sequels; they intensify it.

Common misconceptions

The first is that a nearly full grid means a big round is coming. Each respin is independent of how full the grid looks.

The second is that Collectors are always valuable. A Collector on an empty grid gathers almost nothing — timing is everything and it is random.

The third is that the base game is broken. It is deliberately thin because the bonus holds the return.

Who this suits

This suits a player who wants the original version of a format now copied everywhere, and who has the patience for a game where nothing happens until it does.

It suits poorly anyone who needs an engaging base game, and anyone in a market where buys are unavailable who is not prepared for a long wait.

FAQ

The bonus buy arithmetic, worked through

Money Train is where most players first encounter a bonus buy, so it is worth doing the sums properly once — they apply to every buy on this site.

A buy priced at 100x your stake costs the same as 100 base-game spins. If the bonus triggers naturally around once every 150 to 200 spins, buying is roughly comparable in expected cost to waiting, and studios price it that way deliberately.

What changes is not the price but the variance.

	100 base spins	One 100x buy
Cost at $0.20 stake	$20	$20
Number of outcomes	100	1
Time taken	~5 minutes	~30 seconds
Chance of ending with nothing	Low	Meaningful

Why the industry adopted buys so quickly

A player waiting 200 spins for a feature stakes a modest amount across an hour. A player buying five rounds stakes a large amount in minutes. The expected cost per dollar staked is unchanged — but the dollars staked multiply.

That is the commercial logic behind feature purchasing, and it explains both its spread and why several regulators have moved against it. Buys are prohibited in the UK and restricted in a number of other markets on precisely these grounds.

None of which makes buying irrational for an individual player. It makes it a decision about pace and exposure that is worth taking deliberately rather than by habit.