Bonus hunt rules
Nobody governs bonus hunts. There is no rulebook and no scoring body — but the format has a settled set of conventions, and almost every stream and community follows the same handful. Here is what they are and, more usefully, why each one exists.
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Treat what follows as house rules that most people have converged on, not requirements. The reason to care is comparability: a hunt run to the common conventions can be compared to your last one and to everybody else's. A hunt run to improvised rules can only be compared to itself.
The five that almost everyone follows
1. One bet size for the whole hunt
Fix the stake before the first spin and keep it for every game. This is the rule the arithmetic depends on: it makes break-even a single division, it makes average X comparable across the line-up, and it removes the mid-session judgement call about whether to push the stake on a game that has been slow.
2. Collect first, open later
The whole format is the separation of the two halves. Opening a round mid-collection turns the session into ordinary play with extra bookkeeping, and it makes the cost figure meaningless because part of what you spent has already been returned.
3. Every bonus collected goes in the line-up
No dropping rounds you have gone off, no quietly excluding one collected on a game you swapped out. Break-even is computed over everything collected, so removing rounds after the fact produces a target you never actually faced.
4. Open in the order collected
Cherry-picking the order is where a hunt stops being a fixed, comparable session. Collection order is arbitrary and known in advance, which is exactly what makes it fair.
5. Record the result, whatever it is
A hunt that goes badly and is not written down is the reason so many players believe the format treats them better than it does. Log it or do not log any of them.
Conventions that vary by group
| Question | Common positions | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Does the leftover balance count? | Subtract it from the cost, or ignore it | Subtracting is the accurate one. Ignoring it inflates break-even. |
| Fixed bonus count or fixed budget? | Either, stated up front | A fixed count can run past the budget. A fixed budget can end the hunt with fewer bonuses than planned. |
| Are bought features allowed? | Usually excluded, sometimes counted separately | A bought feature has a known cost, which changes the cost side of the calculation entirely. See the bonus buy comparison. |
| Same game more than once? | Allowed, or capped at two or three rounds | A cap spreads the line-up. No cap is simpler and more common. |
| What counts as the stake for a mixed hunt? | Total stake across all rounds | Never the average of the stakes. Use the total and the arithmetic stays correct. |
Rules for shared and group hunts
Hunts run with several people add a set of questions the solo format never asks. Agree these before the first spin, in writing if money is involved:
- Who contributes what to the starting balance, and whether the split is equal.
- Whether the result is split by contribution or evenly.
- Who records each round, and whose record is authoritative if two disagree.
- What happens to bonuses nobody has opened when the session ends.
On 5scatter a shared hunt records each participant's starting balance separately, so the split falls out of the data instead of out of an argument afterwards.
What no set of rules can do
None of these conventions changes the outcome of a session. They make hunts consistent, comparable and honest to record — that is all they are for. The result of a bonus hunt is decided by the games, and every round is independent of every other one.
Common questions
- Are there official bonus hunt rules?
- No. No regulator or organisation defines the format. The conventions on this page are what streams and player communities have converged on, and their value is that they make sessions comparable — not that anyone enforces them.
- Can you change bet size during a bonus hunt?
- You can, and some players do when a game will not accept their chosen stake. It breaks the single-stake arithmetic, so if you do it, compute break-even from the total stake across all rounds rather than from a bet size times a count.
- Do bought features count in a bonus hunt?
- Most hunts exclude them. A bought feature has a fixed, known cost, so it belongs to a different kind of session — the comparison guide covers how the two formats differ.
- Is it cheating to open bonuses out of order?
- There is nothing to cheat. It does make the session less comparable to other hunts, which is the only reason the collection-order convention exists.