I've never really been interested in Instant Scratch-Its. The ticket you have in your hand is either a winning one or a losing one, and you're just scratching the latex off to see whether you win or lose. However, a couple of years ago Golden Casket released two instant scratch-its that were fundamentally different to these.

Par 5

The one I first saw was called Par 5. It consisted of 30 golf holes, each with a little flag patch that you could scratch off, as shown below. Under each patch was a digit, the number of strokes you took to complete that hole. Unlike normal scratch-its, any ticket could be a winning ticket! You chose whatever 9 holes you wanted for your game - if at least 5 of those 9 holes came up as 5 or less strokes (hence the name "par 5") then you won a prize. For example, if all 9 holes were 5 or less you won $1000.

So this is nice - whether you win or lose depends on your choices (although there is no possible skill involved), rather than being predetermined. It is also nice because it begs an interesting mathematical question: if you were designing this $2 scratch-it with the prizes as listed on the left of the ticket, how many of the 30 holes would you make 5 or less strokes? (It really doesn't matter what the numbers are, just whether they are 5 or less.) The reader is left to do some calculations to answer this question.

Sadly these tickets were discontinued. I heard that what made them so appealing to me was also a great weakness for giving prizes. With a normal scratch-it an agency can decide easily whether to give out a prize or not. Since any of the Par 5 tickets could be a winner, this is more difficult since a player might partially scratch a hole for a peek and the agency would have to make a judgement as to whether it was intentional or just normal wear.

Prize Catch

Very similar to Par 5 was Prize Catch. In this you started by scratching a "prize catch" value, the target weight for a prize catch. You then had 28 fish of which you could scratch away 7 of them (compared to scratching 9 of 30 for Par 5). If 3 or more of your fish were heavier than the prize catch you won a prize. For example, if all 7 were heavier you again won $1000.