Texas Tea Slot Machine

Texas Tea Slots: An Overview

IGT's Texas Tea slots are simple games with five reels and nine pay lines. As with most modern slots, a max bet is required to access the slot's top prizes. Rather than betting multiple credits per pay line, this game allows you to wager a single credit on up to nine lines in denominations ranging from $0.05 to $5 each. That makes the total max bet range of between $0.45 and $45 per spin.

The big appeal of Texas Tea is its three bonus rounds, each of which can be triggered frequently, since it only takes three scatter symbols to trigger any of them. That means the bonus rounds appear regularly. The only downside is that all three of them depend in some way on your triggering wager, which works against people who place max bets but choose a less-costly denomination.

As the next biggest prize is worth only 1,000 credits, it's clear that what you're playing for is the game's biggest payout. We cover how to win that payout in the Game Symbols section below. The value of Texas Tea's top jackpot ranges from $500 to $50,000, depending on your selected credit size.

Game Symbols

As with all IGT games, Texas Tea contains game icons that support a central theme. The theme here is the oil industry, so you'll see all the trappings of prospecting for oil. Here's a list of all the symbols, along with information about potential payouts and how these symbols are tied to the game's two bonus features.

• Bag of Cash – A basic symbol, five of which lead to a 100-credit payout.
• Drill – Another basic symbol, five of which lead to a 250-credit payout.
• Beat-up Pickup – Another basic symbol, five of which lead to a 350-credit payout.
• Watch – A wild symbol, substitutes for all other standard symbols to form winning combos.
• Texas Ted – A scatter symbol styled after a roughneck's face which triggers a bonus round.
• Chains – A basic symbol, five of which lead to a 50-credit payout.
• Oil Derrick – A scatter symbol which triggers another bonus round.
• The Boss – A scatter symbol which triggers the game's final bonus round.
• Oil Strike – A basic symbol, five of which lead to a 1,000-credit payout.
• Game Logo – The game's most-valuable symbol, five of which lead to the 10,000-credit payout.

Bonus Rounds and Special Features

The following are the bonus rounds and special features found in the Texas Tea slot from IGT.

Line up enough Texas Ted symbols and you'll trigger the Oil Dividend bonus. When you trigger this game, Texas Ted cuts you a check. The value of his check is your triggering wager multiplied by the amount he writes down. It's designed to encourage max bets at large denominations, since the difference between a $0.45 triggering bet and a $45 triggering bet are substantial when multipliers are in effect.

When you line up enough oil derrick symbols, you'll see a flash and an animation of the map of Texas appearing on your screen. You're asked to choose different regions to explore with your new derrick. The number of symbols that triggered the bonus round matters – if you only had three, you only get three picks. If you lined up five symbols, you'll get five picks. A random number of credit points is behind each derrick as it goes up, and they add up. Once the cash has been added to your total, you're back to the standard game.

More about the Texas Oil Industry

Texas is the birthplace of the modern American oil industry. The discovery of the Spindletop gusher in Beaumont, Texas in 1901 launched some big names in the industry that we still know today. Companies like Texaco, Gulf Oil, and Shell appeared overnight to compete and eventually dominate Standard Oil.

Consider that before the find at Spindletop, a site producing 200 or 300 barrels a day was considered a big find. When the Spindletop gusher was finally capped and regulated, it was producing 200,000 – 300,000 barrels every day. The word "unprecedented" was invented for situations like this.

This ushered in an era of rapid development. There is no parallel in American history to the sort of rapid industrialization that took place, starting in little Beaumont. Overnight, Texas was the leading oil producing state in America. When the boom spread to Oklahoma, the US was for the first time the top producer of petroleum products.

This boom fueled political change and conflict in ways that still affect global trade and geopolitics today.

By the year 1940, Texas was one of the dominant producers of oil in the world. It had launched the world into the Oil Age, which it is still firmly inside. The Oil Boom protected Texas from the worst aspects of the Great Depression. The Oil Boom turned Texas from a rural state producing wheat and rice into an urban behemoth, with a GDP that would place it among the top twenty economies in the world. Texas Tea may be a cute nickname, but it's anything but a cute product.