Now players can use their keyboard or mouse to scratch away the surface, or even place the game on 'auto-scratch', similar to 'auto-spin' on slots games, where the computer does it for them. Winning sums are sometimes huge – one US couple won $10 million from a $30 scratch card in 2015 – although we should remember that prizes are normally only a few dollars, and big wins are extremely rare.Ģ1st century technology brought scratchers into the digital world with online scratch cards. These included figures from popular board games like Monopoly and major sports such as basketball, soccer and baseball.
holding the US patent for it back then.įrom its simple beginnings, where the object was to scratch away the card's opaque surface to reveal sequences of three or more symbols or numbers, the scratch card branched out into different variations. By 1987 this had evolved into the scratch-off lottery ticket we know today, with Astro-Med, Inc. We can trace scratch cards back to the early 1970s, when scientist John Koza and marketing specialist Daniel Bower joined forces to generate a computer-generated instant lottery game for Scientific Games Corporation (SGC).
The main objective for the player is simple: scratch away the card's surface to unveil cash prizes. Scratch cards (also known as scratchcards, scratchers, or scratch off tickets) are a popular form of gambling entertainment, both in their traditional physical card form and online.
