The Neopian Lottery

It's the Neopian Lottery! Like a gumball machine gone mad, colorful balls bounce around inside the lottery machine, each bearing a unique number. If you can correctly guess which numbers will turn up, you could win—big time!

May the odds be ever in your favor...

How to Play

To participate in the Neopian Lottery, you must buy a ticket (at a cost of 100 NP) containing six unique numbers between 1 and 30. Each ticket's numbers must be unique: you could use the numbers 1-2-3-4-5-6, but not 1-2-3-4-5-5. The order in which you enter the numbers isn't taken into account, as both your ticket and the winning numbers will automatically be reordered from lowest to highest. You can buy up to twenty lottery tickets each day.

Despite what the lottery page says, each day the drawing time gets a little later!

Winning

In order to win, four or more of the numbers on your ticket must match the numbers that come up in the lottery. Only the tickets with the greatest number of matches will be considered winners; even if your ticket has five matching numbers, if someone else has six matches, you would win nothing.

The jackpot each day depends on the number of tickets sold, with any Neopoints spent on tickets going directly to the prize pool. There is also a bonus of 5,000 NP added to the pool; if 10,000 people bought tickets in a given day, the jackpot would be 1,005,000 NP. This jackpoint is split evenly between all winning tickets.

If you have a winning ticket, you will receive an e-mail (not a Neomail) letting you know the winning numbers and how much you've won.

Me, I never play the lotto. Have you taken a statistics class?

Purchasing Strategy

If you would like to increase your odds of winning on a given day, there's a trick that can be used to double your number of tickets: simply purchase twenty tickets sometime after the lottery has been drawn for the day, then purchase another twenty after midnight but before the next drawing. Since the lottery is drawn in the afternoon, but the ability to buy tickets is reset at midnight, you can buy two sets of tickets and use them in a single drawing, though you aren't able to do this two drawings in a row.

You can get additional tickets from a Random Event while surfing the site. This ticket is automatically included in your list of lottery tickets for the day, does not count toward your 20 daily tickets, and if it wins is handled the same as any purchased ticket.

While you're normally unable to purchase multiple tickets with the same numbers on them in a given day, it's possible to do so through a quirk in the way tickets are processed. When generating a ticket from the numbers you've entered, the lottery will reorder the numbers from lowest to highest; by submitting different arrangements of the same numbers, you can receive multiples of the same ticket. However, there is no clear advantage to doing this. While winning with two of the same ticket would award you nearly twice the NP you would get otherwise, it diminishes your odds of winning by a large enough amount as to not be worth it.

Lottery Ticket Purchase Links

Unfortunately, as of October 2020, TNT has decided to discontinue the ability to have clickable lottery ticket purchase links. We have removed our Lotto-Matic tool. If TNT ever changes their mind, we'll certainly add it back. In the meantime, the only way to purchase lottery tickets is to input the numbers yourself on the Lottery page.

Trophies

While the Neopian Lottery doesn't have a traditional high score table, it does award trophies, based on the number of Neopoints won with a single ticket.

If you buy multiple tickets with the same set of numbers as described above and win, your score for trophies is the winnings from just one ticket. For example, if you were the sole winner of a 500,000 NP jackpot, and you bought two tickets with the winning numbers, each ticket would only award 250,000 NP, thus giving you the bronze trophy rather than silver.

This game guide was written by: Chesu