Funky Time Live Show in South African Online Casinos 2024

The live show runs at a medium-sized studio designed in a groovy style. The action is accompanied by rhythmic and danceable funky music unless you will have turned it off in Settings (top right corner). At the backstage, you can see the locations where bonus features take place once activated: rosy metallic doors opening to the Disco bonus, and so on. Disco balls, blue and silvery flashy lights, multi-coloured dance floor, and other elements add to the ambience typical of some neighbourhood nightclubs of the 70s. Packed full of groovy decor, the entire setup looks overcrowded with all these niceties.

Presenters are lively and replace each other around every thirty minutes or so; they talk to players, answering their live chat messages and trying to keep their audience engaged. Maintaining a consistent style, female presenters wear shiny golden dresses, and men are in mint green suits. The vertically mounted wheel is the centrepiece of the Funky Time Evolution studio. 

Players have 15 seconds to place a bet, after which the presenter spins the wheel consisting of 64 wedges. When the wheel finally stops, the flapper at the top will point at the winning segment. If the player’s bet matches the winning segment, a respective cash prize is awarded unless the flapper stops on a bonus segment, in which case the related feature gets underway. 

Fixed at the bottom, chips come in six denominations: $0.10, $0.50, $1, $2, $5, and $25. A double button next to the chips enables you to increase the latest bet by x2 in a click. At the bottom left corner is a statistics grid displaying the outcomes of the previous 24 rounds. Clicking a Statistics button will expand that grid to 48 cells. Though all the results are random, you can try to identify trends and customise your bet choices accordingly. 

Random multipliers

At the beginning of each spin, the massive wheel hub emanates multipliers, like sun rays. Their number and values are random. You can see from 3 to 12 multipliers (this is not certain) for each spin, and their values are x2 to x50. Importantly, game rules do not state the exact figures for these, except for the max multiplier of x50. While testing the game for many hours at a stretch, x30 was the top piece we saw appearing.

The multipliers are assigned to random slots, staying there until the wheel stops. If the winning slot features a multiplier on it, that multiplier applies to the payout. For example, a standard payout for any letter is 25:1. If, say, letter N carries an x3 multiplier, your ultimate loot is x75. Importantly, the multiplication effect is applicable only to the slot where the multiplier has landed. For example, if an x2 hits one of 28 “1” slots, it will apply to the winning only if the pointer stops on that multiplier-carrying slot, not on any other “1”.  

If a multiplier is tied to a bonus slot, it will apply to winnings in the bonus round if it is triggered as a result of the wheel spin.    

The Funky Time game show has four bonus features. Any of them gets unlocked following a wheel spin. Players who placed a bet on the winning bonus segment may participate in the feature and consequently get the cash prize. All other players are lookers-on. Each bonus mini-game is carried out at a designated premise near the wheel.  

This is the most frequently launched bonus in Funky Time online. It gets rolling about once in ten spins. If you have bet on “Bar” and the flapper stopped pointing at this segment, you will also participate in the mini-game. The presenter leaves the stage, approaches a virtual robot bartender and taps the call bell, asking the robot to mix her a drink. Three empty highball glasses are on the bartender’s counter, standing on a blue, yellow, and purple coaster each. The participating players are given about five seconds to pick the preferred glass. If no selection is made, the game makes a random pick for the player.

The robot starts pouring a drink from his flexible metallic arm into each vessel. Before the bartender shifts to the next glass, a  random initial multiplier of x2 to x20 will be assigned to the previous glass. 

After that, the robot’s head starts spinning, revealing a kind of one-reel slot machine at the back of his head. The reel features so-called garnish multipliers of x2 to x5 that will be linked to one of the three glasses. Moreover, a corresponding multiplier from the main game will also apply, if any.

When you play Funky Time for real money, the Disco—and especially the VIP Disco—will be your sought-after kind of bonus feature in the live show. Observing the game throughout the day, we noticed the VIP variation had the top win of x150 to x250, an excellent outcome compared to other bonus features in Funky Time game show. The bonus transports you to a multi-coloured elevated dance floor, whose nocturnal allure is augmented with bonus multipliers on almost every tile. Both bonuses are identical except that the Disco bonus has 37 tiles, and the VIP Disco has 63 tiles and higher multipliers.

Before the feature gets underway, the presenter goes to the DJ booth that features a vinyl record with eight arrows indicating the directions of Mr Funky’s moves—two for each direction (right, left, up, down). Mr Funky’s starting position is at the centre of the dance floor. There are two kinds of multipliers on the floor: regular ones and “X”. Regular multipliers have a numeric expression (x1, x2. etc.). The largest multipliers (x100) are placed at hard-to-reach squares. 

The presenter launches the vinyl record in motion, and after it stops, the arrow will dictate Mr Funky’s move on the dance floor. The multiplier hovering over that tile will be added to the bonus balance (all following multipliers are also added, not multiplied). Alongside regular multipliers, some squares have so-called “floor multipliers” taking the form of the letter “X”, and when the dancer steps on it, five random tile multipliers will be doubled. 

The round ends when Mr Funky reaches the edge of the floor, and the next arrow will point to the outside, thus forcing him to fall off. There are no decisions for you to make throughout the mini-game; you just watch the guy making all these energetic disco dance moves that were iconic in the 70s-80s.    

This bonus game is inspired by Cash Or Crash, another horrific live show by Evolution. Once the wheel stops on the Stayin’ Alive segment, the host heads to the ball drawing machine. On the wall behind it, you will see three identical multiplier columns of the green, purple, and orange colours. Each column represents a ladder with 20 multipliers starting at x5 (at the list bottom) and increasing gradually to x1000 (at the top).   

The machine contains 90 balls of each of the three colours mentioned above and black balls as well. Sadly, Funky Time live casinos give no clue as to how many balls of each colour are present inside the transparent bowl where the balls are contained. 

Before the presenter pulls the silver lever, activating the lottery draw machine, each participating player must pick the ball colour. Failure to do this within about five seconds will force the game to make a pick for the player, much like it happens in the Bar bonus. The mini-game starts, and the balls are extracted from there one by one. Each ball, except for black ones, has number 1 or 2 painted on it. Once a coloured ball is drawn, the players go up the multiplier ladder of the respective colour by one or two steps, depending on the number depicted on the ball. 

At the outset, players have four lives represented as golden records. Each black ball picked from the machine deducts one life. The mini-game runs until no more lives are left. At the end of the game, each player gets a cash prize. It is calculated as your bet multiplied by the multiplier, depending on your ball colour chosen at the beginning.     

Funky Time is Evolution’s live game show that is grounded on the Wheel of Fortune mechanics and features four bonus rounds with a maximum payout of half a million dollars. Bet sizes are not fixed, as casinos may set their own, with a typical range being $0.10 to $5000. The live show’s return is pretty good (almost 96%), but it heavily relies on random multipliers of x2 to x50 that occur on every spin—without hitting them at times, your personal RTP will be much lower than that. You would find it interesting to experiment with betting strategies because Funky Time in South African casinos offers many bet mixes that run the gamut.