How to play
Prize Grid is a pick-‘em game with a twist: you get to see the prizes before you choose, just not where they are. Every round a new board of 24 face-down tiles is dealt, each hiding a multiplier somewhere between ×0 and ×50.
- Build your bet. Choose a chip (40, 200, 400 or 1,000) and tap the Bet spot to add it. Tap again to add more. A round costs 40 to 2,000 credits, always in steps of 40. Clear removes the chips, and Rebet brings back the amount from your last round.
- Press Start. Your bet is taken and the board is dealt.
- Read the strip. Above the grid, a row lists every multiplier on this board, sorted from highest to lowest. You know, for example, that there’s one ×5, three ×2s and five ×0s out there.
- Pick four tiles. Each one flips as you tap it. The message line keeps a running total of what your picks would pay so far.
- After the fourth pick the round is settled, and all 24 tiles turn face up so you can see where the big ones were.
Your payout is your bet multiplied by the average of your four tiles. Pick ×0, ×1, ×2 and ×5 and the average is 2, so a 200 bet returns 400. Payouts are rounded down to a whole credit.
Multipliers
Each tile’s multiplier is drawn on its own, so no two boards look alike. The odds per tile are fixed:
| Multiplier | Chance per tile |
|---|---|
| ×0 | 15.9% |
| ×0.2 | 20.0% |
| ×0.5 | 25.0% |
| ×1 | 20.0% |
| ×2 | 11.0% |
| ×3 | 5.0% |
| ×5 | 2.5% |
| ×10 | 0.5% |
| ×50 | 0.1% |
Multiply each value by its chance and add them up and you get 0.96. That is the expected value of one tile, and since your payout is just the average of four tiles, it’s also the expected value of a whole round: the game returns 96% of what you bet over time.
The odds of a round
Because the four picks are blind, they behave exactly like four independent tiles drawn from the table above. Working through every combination gives these chances per round:
- Break even or better (average of ×1 or more): about 36%.
- Make a profit (average above ×1): about 33%.
- Double up or better (average ×2 or more): about 6%.
- Five times your bet or more: about 0.4%, roughly once in 240 rounds.
- All four tiles ×0: under 0.1%.
As for the board itself, a ×50 shows up somewhere on it in about 2.4% of rounds, and at least one ×10 or ×50 in about 13%. Even then you have to find it among 24 tiles.
Most rounds return part of the bet. A lot of the board is ×0.2, ×0.5 and ×1, so about half of all rounds hand back between a third of the bet and just under the full amount.
Strategy
There is no clever order to pick in. The tiles are placed at random each round and nothing on the board hints at a location, so every unopened tile is worth the same. A few things are still worth knowing:
- The strip is information, not a signal. A board loaded with ×10s is exciting to watch, but you place your bet before it’s dealt, and each pick is still a 1-in-24 guess for any particular tile.
- Averaging is your cushion. One ×0 costs you a quarter of the bet, not all of it. That’s why total wipe-outs are so rare here compared with games where one wrong pick ends the round.
- The flip side is that big hits get diluted. A ×50 found alongside three ×0.5 tiles averages out to about ×12.9, not ×50.
- Bet size controls everything. With the minimum of 40, a 1,000-credit balance lasts many rounds; at 1,000 per round a short cold streak empties it.
For instant-win games where the result is fixed at purchase, try Scratch Tic-Tac-Toe or the symbol-matching Treasure Hunt card.
If you enjoy Prize Grid, try Progressive 21 or Pull Back Poker next.
