How to play
This is the classic six-from-forty-nine format, the shape most national lotteries used for decades. The difference is that every prize here is fixed, so a jackpot never rolls over or gets split.
- Choose 6 numbers on the board of 49. A second tap removes a number. Quick pick chooses six for you; Clear wipes the board.
- Pick the ticket price: 10, 50 or 100 credits.
- Press Play. Six balls tumble out of the drum into the tray, and the board lights up each drawn number, with your matches standing out.
Your six numbers and the ticket price are remembered between draws (and between visits), so a regular line can be replayed with a single press. The first session starts with 1,000 credits.
Pay table and the chance of each prize
| Numbers matched | Prize | Chance |
|---|---|---|
| 6 | 1,000,000× | 1 in 13,983,816 |
| 5 | 10,000× | 1 in 54,201 |
| 4 | 200× | 1 in 1,032 |
| 3 | 15× | 1 in 57 |
| 2 | 1× (ticket back) | 1 in 7.6 |
Fewer than two matches happens on about 85% of tickets: no match at all about 44% of the time, exactly one about 41%.
The 13,983,816 figure is the number of different six-number sets you can make from 49. It’s worth getting a feel for it. Playing one ticket a second without a break, you’d expect to wait about five months for the jackpot. Even the 10,000× second prize turns up roughly once in 54,000 tickets, which is far longer than anyone plays a free game.
The in-game Pay table (the fold-out panel below the board) shows the same prizes with the same “1 in …” odds, worked out live from the rules.
Where the 84.7% goes
Each prize multiplied by its chance and summed gives an exact return of 84.7% of every ticket. That holds for any ticket price and any choice of numbers.
The lower prizes do most of the work:
| Prize line | Share of the return |
|---|---|
| 2 matches (refund) | 13.2 points |
| 3 matches | 26.5 points |
| 4 matches | 19.4 points |
| 5 matches | 18.4 points |
| 6 matches | 7.2 points |
So a quarter of the return is locked in the two top rows, which in practice you won’t see. What a real session looks like is driven by the three-match wins at 15× and the occasional four-match at 200×. Over a hundred tickets you’d expect one or two three-matches and a one-in-ten chance of a four.
Strategy
No set of six is luckier than another. Each draw takes six balls from a freshly shuffled 49, so earlier results, overdue numbers, birthdays and spread-out patterns have no effect.
In real lotteries people avoid popular numbers because a shared jackpot is smaller. That reasoning doesn’t apply here: prizes are fixed multiples of your own ticket, so there’s nothing to share.
The useful decisions are about money, not numbers:
- Ticket price. At 10 credits a ticket you lose about 1.5 credits per draw on average; at 100, about 15. The cheaper ticket gives you many more draws for the same stake.
- Expectations. A four-match at 200× is the realistic “big win” here. A 100-credit ticket turns it into 20,000 credits.
- When to switch. If you want the upper prizes to feel within reach, the five-ball Number Draw 5/35 has a top prize of 1 in 324,632, at the cost of a lower return (77.8%). The two-drum Lotto 5+2 splits its prizes into many more tiers.
If you enjoy Number Draw 6/49, try Draw Showdown or 8-Game Mix next.
