Card Keno

Forty cards are displayed in a grid. You pick between 1 and 8 of them as your "spots" — the cards you think will be drawn. After you lock in your picks, the system randomly draws 10 cards from the 40-card pool. For each of your spots that matches one of the 10 drawn cards, you score a "hit." The total hits, combined with the number of spots you picked, determines the payout from a fixed pay table: 8-for-8 pays 5,000 dust, 7-for-7 pays 2,000, 1-for-1 pays 3. Picking fewer spots is safer; picking more is higher-variance.

Dust is CardVault’s virtual engagement currency — no real-money value, not redeemable for cards, not a cryptocurrency. It’s the internal scorekeeping unit used across CardVault’s game catalog so you can compare your lifetime performance across Keno, Card Briefcase, Card Dozen, Card Tower Climb, and other games on a single yardstick. All games use the same dust unit; the cross-game leaderboard (coming soon) ranks collectors by total lifetime dust.

The pay table rewards precision at each pick level. Picking 1 spot and hitting it pays 3x your bet — a low ceiling but a 25% hit rate (10 drawn / 40 pool). Picking 8 spots and hitting all 8 pays 5,000x — a massive ceiling but a 0.00003% hit rate. The math works out such that the expected value (EV) of each pick count is roughly similar (slight house edge across all counts), but the variance is dramatically different. Pick 1 or 2 spots for stable small wins; pick 6-8 for the rare grail moment.

Not really. Every card in the grid has an equal draw probability (1/40 per draw, uniform random), so selecting "hot" cards or "lucky" numbers has no mathematical edge — that's what makes it pure lottery. The only strategic choice is how many spots to pick. If you want the lowest variance (stable gameplay feel), pick 2-3 spots. If you want the highest dust ceiling (occasional massive wins, many blank rounds), pick 6-8 spots. Think of it like a slot machine’s volatility dial.

Daily mode uses a deterministic seed based on the current calendar date — every CardVault visitor playing today sees the same 40-card grid, the same 10 drawn cards, and can only play once per day. Daily results are comparable across the collector community. Free-Play mode uses fresh randomness on every play, lets you play as many rounds as you like, but does not count toward the daily leaderboard. Use Daily for competitive comparison, Free-Play for practice or for running your own pay-table math.

The top-tier win is 8-of-8 (pick 8 spots, hit all 8): 5,000 dust in a single round. The second-highest is 7-of-7 at 2,000 dust, then 6-of-6 at 800, 5-of-5 at 300, 4-of-4 at 125, 3-of-3 at 50, 2-of-2 at 15, and 1-of-1 at 3. Partial hits (matching some but not all spots) pay progressively smaller amounts per the full pay table. The single rarest outcome in the game is 8-of-8, occurring roughly once every 230,000 plays at uniform randomness.

Yes. After each round the "Share result" button generates a compact emoji-grid summary showing which spots you picked and which hit, along with your payout tier. Paste it anywhere — X, Discord, Bluesky — without leaking card identifiers beyond what appears visually in the emoji grid. The share format mirrors Wordle and other daily-puzzle shares, so friends see your outcome without needing to open the link.