Phoenician Casino Review
An old-school Casino Rewards Microgaming site
By Casinomeister, Last updated Dec 7, 2023
Casinomeister's Verdict
Phoenician Casino has a long history at Casinomeister. Once they were an RTG casino – which had rave reviews from our members- they switched to Microgaming in 2003 and continued to shine.
Years later, they were sold to the Casino Rewards group – which has some of the most experienced staff available to players. They rarely generate complaints. They used to be Accredited here at Casinomeister. Still, due to a few issues (which have since been resolved), they are back in good standing – although they haven’t undergone another Accreditation process. They are currently listed in the “Neutral” zone.
Solid as a rock
First Impression
Phoenician Casino, part of the Casino Rewards network, is an online gaming platform that’s been around since 2003. The casino’s name is inspired by the ancient Phoenician culture, which was established in 2500 BC – and while the site is a solid place to play, 2,500BC appears to be the age in which the design team stopped working; accessing the site is a bit of a nightmare, and it’s clear they’re definitely behind the times when compared to most online casinos.
The casino is well-licensed: The Kahnawake Gaming Commission, the Malta Gaming Authority, the Danish Gambling Authority, and the UK Gambling Commission currently regulate the site.
Phoenician Casino offers a generous welcome bonus package of up to $1,200, spread across your first three deposits. Although the bonus package does not include free spins, it’s still pretty decent. However, it’s worth noting that the first two bonus offers have crazy wagering requirements of 200X; more on this later.
The casino offers over 500 games, including various slots, table games, and live dealer games powered by Microgaming and Evolution. The games are playable through an instant-play platform in web browsers or a downloadable client that can be installed on Windows devices. You should, however, be aware that Microgaming is the only provider of slots; you won’t find any other game developers like Quickspin or Netent.
One of the main benefits of playing at Phoenician Casino is that it’s linked to the Casino Rewards Group. This centralised bonus reward system shares your progress among all CR-powered casinos. To kick off this Phoenician Casino review, we will look at the main first deposit bonus and other promotions in more depth.
Pros
Decent selection of Microgaming games
Good range of hard-to-find Microgaming slots
Casino Rewards VIP program
Trustworthy brand
Licensed by reputable regulators
Cons
Slow cashouts
Low withdrawal limits
Insanely high wagering requirements on the first deposit bonus
Top 5 casinos 
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BONUSES AND PROMOTIONS
At Phoenician Casino, rewarding players has always been at the heart of their philosophy, and they do this through various bonuses and promotions. However, as noted earlier, pay close attention to the wagering requirements; they’re insanely high on the first deposit and second bonuses – and are almost impossible to beat.
The following section of this Phoenician Casino review will examine the bonuses and promotions available, from the main welcome bonus to ongoing promotions and the VIP program.
Exclusive offers
Welcome Offer
Phoenician Casino offers a three-tiered welcome bonus system. The first bonus – their welcome bonus – offers a 50% bonus up to $50. This isn’t the most generous welcome bonus in the world, and it becomes even less appealing when you look at the terms and conditions; the wagering requirements are a staggering 200X! What’s more, the play-through percentages vary by game, with 2% for Classic Blackjack, Video Poker, American Roulette, and Other Roulette, 10% for Other Blackjack, Craps, and Baccarat, 50% for Poker Games, Casino War, and Sic Bo, and 100% for most slots – but not all.
The second deposit bonus offers a 25% bonus up to $200, with the same 200X wagering requirements as the first deposit bonus. The play-through requirements are also the same. Thankfully, the third deposit bonus is slightly more achievable – offering a 200% matched deposit bonus of up to $950. The wagering requirements on this bonus are just 30X.
The minimum deposit for all three deposit bonuses is $10. However, new players must claim the first deposit bonus within seven days of creating an account. The full terms and conditions can be found on the casino’s website.
No-Deposit & Free Spins Offers
When writing this review, Phoenician Casino was not actively offering any no-deposit bonuses. We were also unable to find any no-deposit free spins. If this changes in the future, we’ll update this Phoenician Casino review accordingly.
Casino Rewards Group VIP Program
As part of the Casino Rewards Group, Phoenician Casino offers its players access to one of the most competitive loyalty programs in the online casino industry: the Casino Rewards Group VIP program.
When you sign up with Phoenician Casino, you’re instantly part of this rewards program, which offers many benefits to improve your gaming journey.
As a VIP member, you have exclusive access to certain games, personalised bonuses, priority customer service, and other bonuses from Phoenician Casino. Each bet you place with real money accumulates comp points over time. You can redeem these points for bonus cash once you’ve earned enough.
What’s great about the Casino Rewards loyalty scheme is that your progress towards the bonus is carried over across all the online casinos on the network. This means you can play on one site and redeem your points on another!
The loyalty program is structured into six VIP tiers. As you might expect, the higher your level, the more generous the bonuses you receive. The unique features of the loyalty scheme, combined with attractive sign-up offers, show that Phoenician Casino isn’t all bad regarding bonuses. However, we still have issues with the insane wagering requirements attached to the primary deposit bonus promotion – and this is something that virtually no online gambling sites are doing today, as it simply turns away players.
Cashback
Bonus Terms
Sign up process
BANKING AND PAYMENT METHODS
Phoenician Casino provides plenty of deposit options to accommodate a diverse player base. Depending on where you live, you’ll be able to choose from the following payment methods: Bank Transfers, Credit Card, Debit Card, E-Wallets like Paypal, Neteller, Skrill, and other services like EcoPayz, MuchBetter, Google Pay, Neosurf, plus Prepaid Cards like Paysafecard and Prezzy Card.
The deposit process at Phoenician Casino is made to be as simple as possible. After picking your payment method and entering the amount to deposit, the funds typically appear in your casino account within minutes, so you can begin playing your favourite casino games immediately.
Casino Rewards casinos – including Phoenician Casino – have also earned recognition in the online gambling space for their low minimum deposit requirements. At most of their sites, you can deposit from as little as $1 – although if you plan to claim a deposit bonus, you will need to deposit more than this.
It’s also worth mentioning that the casino accepts various currencies, including Canadian Dollars. However, once a currency has been chosen (during account creation), it is fixed and cannot be changed later. To our knowledge, no cryptocurrencies are accepted at the site at the time of writing.
All deposit methods at Phoenician Casino are free, so you won’t need to pay any transaction fees to the casino. However, your bank or card issuer may charge a fee depending on the currency you’re depositing, so keep this in mind.
A note for UK players: New United Kingdom Gambling Commission regulations prohibit credit card transactions for deposits and withdrawals. Additionally, bonus balances must be segregated from cash balances, and Phoenician Casino abides by both regulations.
Phoenician Casino Withdrawal Speed
Regarding withdrawals, Phoenician Casino offers a similar selection to its deposit methods. Major credit and debit cards are accepted for withdrawals, although EWallets are typically faster and less prone to fees, making them the better choice in Casinomeister’s opinion.
Sadly, the speed of withdrawals is one area where the online casino could enhance its service. The withdrawal limit is: “A maximum of $/€/£4000 per week if a player’s winnings are five times greater than their overall purchases across all Casino Rewards partner casinos. All jackpot wins/payouts are not subject to this clause.”
Moreover, there’s a compulsory 48-hour waiting period for any withdrawal requests, meaning you’ll need to wait at least two business days for your withdrawal to be approved. If you’re playing from outside the UK, you can cancel your withdrawal during this time.
UK players cannot reverse their withdrawals – although it’s unclear whether UK players are still accepted at the casino, as the URL appears to redirect UK residents to Luxury Casino – another CR brand that targets the UK market.
Phoenician Casino is regulated in several pretty strict markets – you could say it’s a well-regulated casino. Subsequently, the casino requires its players to complete a verification check before withdrawing. You will be required to provide verification documents, such as a government-issued ID, proof of address, and proof of payment method.
Once you have submitted the required documents and they’ve been approved, the Phoenician Casino team will pass your withdrawal request to the banking team. From this point, the time it takes for the funds to hit your account depends on your chosen withdrawal method. Withdrawals via EWallets usually appear within your account instantly, while bank transfers and card withdrawals can take between one and ten banking days.
Responsible Gaming
Phoenician Casino strongly advocates responsible gaming and offers numerous tools to assist players in maintaining control of their gambling habits.
For players wishing to manage their gambling habits more effectively, Phoenician Casino provides the option to set deposit limits. This allows you to cap your daily, weekly, or monthly deposit amounts, ensuring you don’t have to worry about straying outside your budget.
Additionally, Phoenician Casino offers a self-exclusion feature for those who need a break from gaming. To begin a self-exclusion agreement, head to your account’s “responsible gambling” page and select how long you’d like to exclude from the site. You will then be immediately blocked from playing.
Phoenician Casino provides access to professional help organisations for players who need further assistance. Links to organisations such as Gamblers Anonymous, GamCare, and Gambling Therapy are provided on their website, offering players resources for additional support and counselling.
Customer Support
Phoenician Casino offers a robust customer support system, ensuring players can get assistance regardless of when they’re playing. The casino offers 24/7 live support through a chat platform Casino Rewards operates. While some players prefer a dedicated customer support channel, CR does an excellent job and has a good command over all the brands they operate.
In addition, to live chat, the casino maintains a general support email address that can be used to send verification documents and complaints. While Phoenician Casino used to offer customer support via phone, we could not find an active phone number when we wrote this review. Casino Rewards, however, does – so you can probably use this same phone number to get help with your Phoenican Casino account.
KYC
Phoenician Casino is committed to maintaining a secure and fair gaming environment. As part of this commitment, they follow a comprehensive KYC procedure designed to verify their players’ identity and prevent fraudulent activities. This is a term of their online gambling licence, so they’re not running these checks because they want to inconvenience players but because they are legally obliged to.
When registering an account at Phoenician Casino, you must provide basic personal information such as your name, date of birth, address, and email address. However, to complete the KYC process, additional documents are required. These typically include a government-issued identification card (like a passport or driver’s licence), a recent utility bill showing proof of address, and proof of payment method, where applicable.
Industry-standard encryption technology securely stored and protected all the information provided during the KYC process. The documents are only used for identity verification and are not shared with third parties. This stringent verification process is critical in maintaining a safe and responsible gaming environment, ensuring only legal-aged players engage in gaming activities and that all financial transactions are legitimate. Phoenician Casino aims to process all KYC documents within 48 hours, although they usually do so within 24 hours, from what we’ve been told.
Website Experience and Features
Desktop and Mobile Gaming
Phoenician Casino allows gamblers to play on three versions of their site: desktop, mobile, and through a downloadable client. Firstly, let’s look at the desktop experience. The website layout is – well, pretty awful, in our opinion. Despite once having a user-friendly interface, the site is almost impossible to access today, with glitching, error messages, and a terrible UI that flashes numerous times before loading. It’s glitchy, hard to access, and almost out of the past. It’s safe to say that most players would probably appreciate an update to the desktop platform.
While the site touts itself as being mobile-optimised, we can’t see how a player could feasibly play from their mobile devices. The desktop version of the site is bad enough, and we can’t even imagine playing from the mobile version of the website. Again, Phoenician Casino has a lot of work to do here.
The only area where Phoenician Casino excels in this respect is the downloadable software client. They still offer Microgaming’s downloadable software client – something that’s almost unheard of in today’s day and age. While it works pretty well, we should point out that it’s redundant, with most players choosing to use instant play gaming instead.
Brand games
Providers
Phoenician Casino is part of the established Casino Rewards group and is powered by two key software providers: Microgaming and Evolution Gaming. Though Phoenician Casino has yet to partner with additional game developers, limiting its gaming collection’s diversity, it hosts games from all of Microgaming’s partner studios through the Quickfire platform.
These partnerships enable Phoenician Casino to provide games from a host of renowned studios, including Neon Valley Studios, SpinPlay Games, Buck Stakes Entertainment, Northern Lights Gaming, Triple Edge Studios, All41 Studios, Electric Elephant Games, Stormcraft Studios, Switch Studios, Real Dealer Studios, Pulse 8 Studios, Rabcat, Gameburger Studios, GONG Gaming, and Games Global.
Sure, these aren’t the big, mainstream names you may be used to seeing in recent years, especially if you’re a crypto fanatic. However, these additional game studios provide an additional layer of depth, which we’re always happy to see.
Players can play these games: through the browser-based web platform or the downloadable software available to PC users. We’ll discuss this software client later on. For now, we will look at some notable games Phoenician Casino offers.
Slots
Microgaming slot fans will find pretty much everything they could ever want at Phoenician Casino, and the site is known for hosting some of the older Microgaming titles that are pretty hard to find at most casinos today. One such game is Avalon II, an iconic Microgaming slot. This 5-reel, 243 ways to win game takes you on a mythical journey with King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. A progression-based bonus round lets you “choose your own destiny”, and your progress is saved for up to 180 days!
Another must-try slot game is Jungle Jim El Dorado. This 5-reel, 25-payline game takes you on an adventure with Jungle Jim as he seeks the lost gold of El Dorado. The game features rolling reels and a multiplier trail that could lead you to a win of up to 3,680X your bet!
Some other popular Microgaming slots you can play include Lost Vegas, Six Acrobats, Mermaids Millions, Hot as Hades, Game of Thrones, Break da Bank Again, and more.
As mentioned, while you won’t find games from other software providers, you can play games from Microgaming’s partner studios. This includes SpinPlay Games, Neon Valley Studios, Rabcat, and Foxium are available for enjoyment. Some standout titles include Diamond Inferno, 9 Masks of Fire, North Storm, Noble Sky, and Galactic Gold.
Live Casino
Phoenician Casino offers a variety of live casino games powered by the industry-leading Evolution Gaming. This includes popular table games like Baccarat, Casino-Streamed Roulette, Ultimate Texas Hold ‘Em, and more.
Notable live games include Monopoly Live, a unique blend of the classic board game and a money wheel, with a virtual Mr Monopoly that adds a whole new dimension to the gameplay. Dream Catcher is another popular game show title, although it’s now been overshadowed mainly by Crazy Time – an even more volatile live game show with significantly more chances to win.
Monopoly Live and Dream Catcher can be enjoyed via Phoenician Casino’s instant play site or the downloadable software client. However, for some reason, when writing this casino review, we noticed that many of Evolution’s recent games were unavailable to play. It’s unclear whether they’re simply lagging or have decided to stop updating their live dealer casino.
Table Games and Video Poker
Phoenician Casino provides diverse casino games to cater to various player preferences. On their casino games page, you can access a vast selection of casino table games, ranging from casino table games to video poker.
If you’re a blackjack fan, Phoenician Casino has you covered with a selection of games that pit you against the dealer. Whether you prefer American or European Blackjack, both options are available here. Roulette, another classic casino favourite, is also available at Phoenician Casino. Here, you can place your bets on red or black, odd or even, or try your luck with a specific number for potentially bigger payouts.
The video poker offering at this Microgaming casino isn’t the best, and it’s fair to say that other gaming sites and other casinos offer a more comprehensive range. However, the Microgaming software still offers a decent selection, and you will find most of the classics like Tens of Better, Jacks or Better, Deuces Wild, and All American Poker.
Progressive Jackpots
Phoenician Casino offers some progressive jackpot games, where the jackpots keep growing until one lucky player hits the right combination. The casino lists several games, including Mega Vault Millionaire and Mega Moolah, with jackpots frequently reaching into the multi-million-dollar range.
Please note: if you’re playing with cash bonuses, you cannot play any progressive jackpot games. Casino bonuses at most other casinos are the same, which is not unique to Phoenician Casino.
About the Team and History
Phoenician Casino, launched in 2002, has a rich history that has evolved over the years to shape it into the reputable online casino it is today. Initially, it operated on the Real Time Gaming platform, and it was one of the early online casino pioneers – quickly building a player base and becoming a hit with online gamblers.
In 2003, in an attempt to further improve and enhance the gaming experience for its users, Phoenician Casino switched to the globally recognised Microgaming platform. It remains a Microgaming casino, although in 2008, the site was sold to the Casino Rewards Group. This acquisition brought together a highly experienced staff dedicated to maintaining the high standard of service that players had come to expect from Phoenician Casino.
Over the years, this veteran team has kept player complaints to a minimum, further solidifying Phoenician Casino’s reputation as a reliable and trusted online casino. While the Casino Rewards group ran into some issues regarding shady marketing practices a while ago, these have now been stamped out. While they’re no longer an Accredited Casino here at Casinomeister, we generally don’t have any complaints and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them to our members.
Regarding licensing, Phoenician Casino operates under licences from some of the most stringent regulatory bodies in the online gaming industry. The casino is licensed and regulated by the Kahnawake Gaming Commission, a Canadian-based regulatory authority known for its strict compliance requirements. They also hold UKGC and MGA licences.
Complaints and Track Record
In a sign of just how long Casinomeister has been around when writing this review, we dug out this humorous thread from 2004! Not all players were happy with Phoenician Casino’s “move” from an RTG to a Microgaming casino. Chalupa posted here, saying:
“I had played at Phoenician/Nostalgia when they were using RTG software and was very impressed with the customer service, clear bonuses, and instant Neteller withdrawals.
Unfortunately, all that has changed. I was disappointed to learn they had become YAMGS (Yet Another MicroGaming Skin).”
However, aside from a few general complaints like this, Phoenician Casino – and its sister sites like Nostalgia – generally have a solid reputation and generate very few complaints in the forum.
Casino Facts
| Founded | 2004 |
| Accredited at Casinomeister | Nope - removed |
| Jurisdictions | Kahnawake, Malta Gaming Authority, Danish Gambling Authority, UKGC |
| Casino representative | Affiliate Program Manager and CM Player Complaint Rep |
| Affiliate program | Rewards Affiliates |
| Is this casino certified at Casinomeister | No |
| Payout time | 48 hrs |
| Reverse time | 48 hrs |
| Payout limits | $/€/£4000 a week for players who win a sum that is 5 times or more greater than their total purchases across all Casino Rewards partner casinos. All progressive wins/payouts are exempt from this clause. |
| Weekend payouts | No |
| Locks withdrawals | No |
The man with the plan here at Casinomeister. Bryan Bailey has been running Casinomeister since its launch in June of 1998. He has watched the industry grow from its primeval stage to what it is now. The Meister has attended nearly 100 conferences in the past 20 years and has either been a speaker or a panel moderator for at least 60 events. He has always been an advocate of fairness and reason and is known to like German beer, a good Scotch, and astrophotography.
bryan@casinomeister.com
