Money Train is where it all started. Relax Gaming dropped this in August 2019 and basically rewrote the rulebook for high-volatility bonus slots. Every Money Cart, every Hand of Anubis, every Cash Cart clone you've seen since traces back to this exact game. That's not marketing fluff. The mechanic genuinely came from here.
The setup is a Wild West heist on a moving train. You're playing on top of a vintage wooden wagon with brass fittings and lanterns swinging on chains, animated hooks clanking, tumbleweeds rolling past as distant mesas blur in the desert haze. A locomotive chugs along at the front of the screen. The high-pay symbols are gang members – sheriff in a black hat, grim outlaw, banker, conductor – and the low pays are card royals carved into weathered wood. It's atmospheric without trying too hard.
Mechanically, the base game runs on 5 reels by 4 rows with 40 fixed paylines, RTP of 96.20%, high volatility, and a hit frequency of roughly 25%. Bet range goes 0.10 to 100. And honestly? The base game is mostly about waiting. You're farming the Money Cart Bonus, full stop. Three or more Scatters trigger it, and that's the only thing that really matters here. Spin-to-spin payouts during the base game feel thin. Some players hate that. I get it.
The Money Cart Bonus is the whole point. The grid transforms into the moving wagon, you start with 3 respins, and the counter resets to 3 every time a new persistent symbol lands. You've got coin prizes, Payers that dump their value across matching positions, Collectors that sweep everything into the pot, persistent versions of both, Dynamite explosions, gang member symbols, and crucially the Widener. That last one expands the grid by adding a whole new reel column, and it's unique to this original release. Sequels dropped it entirely for different expansion tricks. If you want the classic 7-reel Money Cart experience, this is the only place to find it.
Max win caps at 20,000x bet. In 2019 that was huge. By today's standards, with MT2 hitting 50,000x and MT3 pushing 100,000x, it looks fairly modest. The Buy Feature costs 80x bet and pushes RTP to 98.00%, but it's UK-restricted, which is annoying friction for anyone in that market. No jackpots, no progressive nonsense – just the bonus or bust. A bit one-dimensional, but the bonus itself is genuinely brilliant, and it's the genesis of an entire generation of slots.