The Sapphire Sleeper: scratch the frost off a first-class ticket

Koko is not a morning koala. On the poster he yawns in blue satin pyjamas and a nightcap with a crescent moon, hugging a cushion in a carriage lit by brass lamps. He is the mascot of The Sapphire Sleeper, a scratch card dressed up as a first-class ticket on the Sapphire Sleeping Car Company. You can play The Sapphire Sleeper free on this page, using virtual credits, with no download and no sign-up, which makes it an easy free scratch card to learn in a few minutes.

Buying and scratching a ticket

Set the ticket price with the minus and plus buttons, then press Buy ticket. The card shows nine frosted windows and a round Destination stamp. Rub the frost away with a finger or the mouse, or press Reveal all if you would rather see everything at once. The ticket is decided at the moment you buy it, so scratching quickly, slowly or in a particular order changes nothing. That said, revealing window by window is half the charm.

What wins

Three windows showing the same item win that item’s prize. The items are a cast of night-train luggage and finery: a rose, a top hat, perfume, pearls, a trunk, a pocket watch, a sapphire brooch and, at the top, the locomotive. Prizes run from half the ticket price for the rose up to a hundred times the ticket price for the locomotive. A ticket can hold at most one winning item, so there is no stacking of matches.

The Destination stamp

The stamp in the corner names a city, Paris, Vienna, Venice, Athens or Istanbul, along with a multiplier from ×1 to ×10. It applies to the whole win on the ticket, compartment prizes included. A modest three-of-a-kind can become a respectable result if the stamp lands on a high multiplier, and the scratch on the stamp is often the moment worth saving until last.

Koko’s compartments

Some windows hide a brass punch instead of an item. Find three and Koko opens his compartments: five closed doors, of which you pick two. Each hides between 5 and 100 times the ticket price, and whatever you find is multiplied by the Destination stamp as well. Afterwards the game shows you what was behind the doors you left shut. The maximum on any single ticket is 1,000× the ticket price.

A sensible way to use the demo

Scratch the first ten tickets by hand to get a feel for the layout, then switch to Reveal all and run thirty or forty more at a low price, perhaps 20p. Keep an eye on how often two punches appear without the third, and how the stamp shifts the totals. Autoplay is there for longer runs and can stop when the compartments open, so you still make the picks yourself.

The Sapphire Sleeper is a Nocturn Play instant-win game and works nicely on touchscreens, where scratching with a fingertip feels natural. Demo credits are not money. When you want to play with a real stake, the same ticket is sold at the casinos below.