At Pollard Banknote, we love Crossword recreation. Our historical past within the class dates again to 1994, when our Improvements staff developed the trade’s first translucent marking system—and we haven’t slowed down since. During the last 15 years, we’ve produced roughly half of all Crossword video games launched in North America, underscoring our longstanding management and deep experience in creating excellent video games on this house.
As Crossword continues to evolve as a class, we’re laser-focused on offering revolutionary, collaborative options to our lottery companions to assist elevate their present portfolio combine and create new alternatives so as to add worth to the participant expertise. From idea to launch, we work carefully with our lottery companions to make sure each ticket is function constructed—reflecting clear targets and actual market wants.
This partnership-driven strategy turns into particularly invaluable when lotteries look to introduce a brand new value level inside a well-established product class like Crossword. Acquainted playstyles should be thoughtfully reimagined via collaboration, insights, and creativity to resonate with loyal gamers whereas attracting new ones.
Case Research: $30 Million Greenback Crossword
A robust instance of this strategy is Million Greenback Crossword launched by the Arizona Lottery in 2024. To discover the viability of accelerating the worth level from $25 to $30, we carried out a North American cross‑market evaluation with the lottery to grasp how premium Crossword choices carry out. The important thing query: Would loyal Arizona Crossword gamers help a premium tier ticket?
The answer concerned a multi-layered product technique:
Expanded gameplay via Pollard Banknote’s Play Round™ innovation, which added an extra recreation grid on the ticket’s reverse aspect. This additional recreation grid provided extra possibilities to win and elevated participant worth with out increasing the ticket’s bodily footprint.
Excessive influence visible enchantment utilizing Spectrum Scratch FX™, delivering a elegant, premium presentation that aligned with the elevated value level.
1:1 participant engagement via a summer time Second Likelihood promotion, the $500K Giveaway, which drove each retail spending and participation. This initiative was fostered by the Arizona Lottery Gamers Membership and resulted in $5.8M in retail spending over the three months.
A strengthened prize construction, by rising the highest prize from $500,000 on the $25 ticket to a $1 million grand prize on the brand new $30 ticket.
Million Greenback Crossword gained traction shortly, reinforcing that gamers had been longing for a premium Crossword expertise when paired with considerate design and interesting promotional help. Million Greenback Crossword carried out 25.8% better in weekly common gross sales when in comparison with the previous $25 Crossword scratcher recreation’s weekly common inside its first yr.
“Collaborating with the Arizona Lottery to deliver their marquee Crossword value level to life was really a deal with. They understood that their loyal Crossword gamers would demand a premium expertise that might guarantee their new $30 Crossword recreation delivered a sustainable efficiency. Our Pollard Banknote staff was privileged to supply insights and proposals that might ship on these targets to create a very excellent recreation,” Travis Priest, Director, Gross sales and Advertising and marketing, Pollard Banknote.
A New Core Sport Worth Level
Arizona’s success with the inaugural $30 Million Greenback Crossword firmly established this recreation as a staple of their annual technique. With refreshed visuals rolled out for the 2025 version and robust momentum behind the class, the muse is ready for continued revolutionary development.
Trying forward, the longer term is vivid: the lottery is exploring new methods to innovate and refresh their premium Crossword choices out there. This contains value-adding improvements like EasyPack™—a Pollard Banknote proprietary greeting card-style format ticket that doubles gameplay whereas remaining absolutely suitable with commonplace ITVMs.
Elevating Crossword, Collectively
We imagine that significant outcomes are constructed via partnership. By collaborating carefully with our lottery companions, we proceed to create immediate video games that carry out in at present’s markets whereas paving the best way for future innovation. And whereas Crossword will at all times be Crossword, our shared dedication to purposeful design and class‑main innovation ensures each new evolution—like Arizona’s marquee $30 value level—delivers a fascinating, rewarding expertise that retains gamers coming again.
Source link
