Scritchy Scratchy

An incremental game built on the structure of scratch cards, and an unusually honest one about what that structure actually is. You buy a card, scratch it, and the expected return is slightly less than the cost — so the only way forward is unlocking better card tiers, each with its own odds and ceiling, using the winnings from the tier below. That makes it a progression game rather than a gambling simulation, and the interesting part is that the odds are visible. You can see what a tier pays and how often, which turns the decision about when to move up into an arithmetic one, and the efficient path is to grind a tier until the next one is comfortably affordable rather than gambling on an early jump. Automation arrives later and removes the scratching entirely. There is no real money anywhere in it and nothing to buy, which is worth stating plainly. It runs in a background tab, saves reliably, and reaches a visible endpoint rather than stretching indefinitely. It plays one-handed on a phone and is a sharper game than its premise suggests, mostly because it shows you the mathematics the real thing hides.