How we score value.

Each agency publishes, for every instant game, some slice of its prize tiers — how many of each were printed and how many are still unclaimed. That’s the raw material. The Value Score reads it every morning and asks one question: are the big prizes disproportionately still out there?

Not every agency discloses the same slice, though — so Lottizen uses three different formulas depending on what a given province actually publishes, and labels which one applies on every ranking page. See the three methods below for the full breakdown.

Three scoring methods

A province’s data-completeness badge (shown on its ranking board) tells you which of these applies before you even open a ticket:

1 · Retention — Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec (“Full tier data”)

OLG, BCLC, and Loto-Québec all publish a real printed total and a real remaining count for every valued prize tier. This is the richest data, so it gets the full retention formula — see the step-by-step walkthrough below.

2 · Remaining Value Index — Western Canada / WCLC (“Remaining counts only”)

WCLC (covering Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba) never publishes how many prizes a ticket printed with — only how many of each tier (≥$100) are still unclaimed today. Retention is mathematically impossible without a printed total, so Western Canada instead uses:

— the dollar value of remaining prizes, disclosed tiers only, per dollar of ticket price. This is a raw CAD figure, not a 0-100ish score, and it is not comparable to Ontario/BC/Quebec’s retention scores or to Atlantic Canada’s top-prize percentage — only to other Western Canada games.

3 · Top Prize Remaining % — Atlantic Canada / ALC (“Top prizes only”)

ALC (covering New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, PEI, and Newfoundland & Labrador) publishes a real printed total and remaining count — but only for a game’s own headline top prize tier(s), never any lower tier. So Atlantic Canada’s score is simply:

— summed over the top tier(s) only. It happens to land on a similar 0-100 scale to the retention score by coincidence of units, but it is measuring something different (one tier, not the whole game) and isn’t directly comparable either.

Data-source limits — and what we’re still digging for

WCLC and ALC’s narrower formulas above reflect what their public feeds actually contain today, not a shortcut we chose. Lottizen has looked (and keeps looking) for any regulatory disclosure, annual-report appendix, or provincial gaming-commission filing where either agency might publish fuller printed-total data — if one turns up, these two provinces will move to the full retention formula. Until then, this is the honest ceiling of what can be measured from public data.

Loto-Québec is a special case worth naming: its printed totals are published on a live “état de réclamation des lots” page (paired total + claimed columns per tier), which Lottizen uses as Quebec’s sole source. During this build we specifically looked for a separate downloadable PDF re-publishing the same per-game totals — to cross-check for drift — and could not locate one distinct from the live page; the one prize-related PDF discoverable from Loto-Québec’s own rules page turned out to be a generic draw-game formula table, unrelated to scratch tickets. If a genuine second source surfaces, reconciling it is a candidate follow-up.

Retention, step by step (Ontario / BC / Quebec)

1 · Add up prizes, two ways

Across a game’s valued prize tiers:

2 · Two fractions left

f is the “remaining prize ratio” — a proxy for how much of the print run is still unsold. g weights that by dollars.

3 · Retention = value vs count

• retention > 1 — big prizes are still disproportionately unclaimed. Better value.
• retention = 1 — prizes draining evenly with sales. Baseline.
• retention < 1 — jackpots mostly gone, small prizes left. Worse value.

4 · Scale to a familiar number

The 0.62 is a rough instant-game return-to-player, used only so a baseline game reads about 62 — roughly “cents of prize value left per dollar.” It’s a fixed multiplier, so it never changes the order of the ranking within a province; that’s driven entirely by the agency’s own counts. We list every game highest score first.

What the score is — and isn’t

• It is a like-for-like way to compare which games still have the most prize value left today, straight from each agency’s own numbers — within one province and scoring method.
• It isn’t a prediction, a system, or a way to beat the odds. The house edge is baked in and unchanged.
• It works from disclosed prize tiers. Each agency’s feed lists a game’s notable prizes, not every $2 win (and for WCLC/ALC, only a subset of tiers at all), so the score reflects the prizes worth chasing. Treat close scores as ties.
• It isn’t comparable across scoring methods. Ontario/BC/Quebec’s retention scores, Western Canada’s Remaining Value Index, and Atlantic Canada’s Top Prize Remaining % are three different measurements — only compare games within the same province.

Freshness

Rankings for all 5 provinces are rebuilt every morning from each agency’s public data, on independent schedules per agency (so one agency’s outage never delays another’s). This page’s data was generated September 3, 2026. Prizes can be claimed at any time — always confirm the current numbers with the official lottery operator (OLG, BCLC, WCLC, ALC, or Loto-Québec) before you buy.