Fun of play fuels our dreams

It all started back on March 30, 2006 with four scratch-off games. They were called: “NCEL,” “Tic Tac Toe,” “Black Jack,” and “$100,000 Carolina Cash.” 

Fast forward 13 years later, you have a wide-ranging portfolio of games to play and promotions to choose from.

It’s the fun of playing lottery games and the thrill of winning prizes that make a lottery popular. In fiscal year 2018, the lottery’s prizes added up to $1.6 billion, or $4.5 million a day on average. That was the highest ever.

Here’s a quick look at our current portfolio of games:

• Scratch-offs: They’re our most popular games. New scratch-offs come out every month on First Tuesday. Prices range from $1 to $30 and prizes range from a “break-even” win to $10 million.
• Draw games: We’ve got Powerball and Mega Millions. Seven North Carolina players have won jackpots ranging from $12 million to $344 million. There’s Lucky For Life, with its unique "for life" prizes of $1,000 A Day For Life. A trio of North Carolina draw games: Carolina Cash 5 with starting jackpots of $100,000, Carolina Pick 4 with a top prize of $5,000, and Carolina Pick 3 with a top prize of $500. And you have our newest draw game of Carolina Keno, with drawings every five minutes and a chance to win $100,000.
• Lucke-Rewards drawings: Members of our Lucke-Rewards program can scan in their lottery tickets for points that can be used to enter weekly or monthly drawings. Drawings this month offer members a chance to win $15,000 in our “Some Like It Hot” monthly drawing or $100 in one of our four “10 Win Quick Cash” weekly drawings.

So a lot of tickets have been printed since the lottery started. If you just tracked our scratch-off games since we started, we’ve printed more than 4.7 billion tickets. If you stretched those scratch-off tickets out end to end you would get:

• 1.7 billion feet
• 331,042 miles
• 608 trips from Murphy to Manteo

The lottery’s website showcases all our games and promotions and provides important information about how to play and the odds of winning. You can click on the “Games” section of the website, nclottery.com/Games, to learn more.

We’ll be sharing information about your lottery all week in this blog and on our Facebook page as part of Lottery Week.

On Friday, you can test what you learned during a LIVE trivia event on the lottery's Facebook page. Join us at 1 p.m. for a fun show and a chance to win a prize. We’ll be giving away five $50 gift cards.