News writer; Opinion columnist
If you ever liked to play Monopoly as a kid, you'll love playing it as an adult. The Colorado Lottery is introducing a new Monopoly Secret Vault scratch-off game with multipliers that increase your prize up to two hundred times.
Read on if you want to learn how you can pass Go, pick up Broadway, and become a Monopoly Millionaire.
Pass go
Monopoly Secret Vault actually offers five new games. For a chance at the million-dollar prize, you need to play the 200X version, which can multiply your prize by 200 if you find the 200X multiplier symbol on your ticket.
The game offers two different million-dollar jackpot instant wins and cash prizes ranging from $20 to $10,000. Tickets cost twenty dollars each to play.
While your odds of taking home a seven-figure payout are 1:1,080,000, your overall odds of winning anything, including a breakeven prize, are a more manageable 1:3.13.
For lower stakes, you can play tickets with multipliers of 100X, 50X, 20X, and 10X, which cost $10, $5, $2 and $1, respectively.
How to win
Unlike a real game of Monopoly, which can end when a frustrated player flips the board over, winning Secret Vault is a little bit less dramatic.
Players only need to match one of their thirty numbers to one of the eight winning numbers to win the corresponding prize. Uncovering a train symbol means that you instantly win the award that goes with it, and finding a multiplier symbol boosts the value of your total prize.
Second chance
The only thing better than one chance to win $1,000,000 is having two chances to win. If you don't win anything on your 200X ticket, you still have the opportunity to win the big prize in a second chance drawing.
To enter, all you have to do is visit the second-chance drawing section of the Colorado State Lottery website and type in the 22-digit code that you can find at the bottom of your ticket. If you'd rather skip all that typing, you can download the Colorado Lottery app onto your smartphone and scan the barcode to be automatically entered into the drawing.
500
These new games will join the existing Monopoly 500X game, which offers the biggest prize of all. The game contains two instant win jackpots, each worth $3 million, and costs $50 per play.
Do not pass go
If you'd rather not play because too many of your real Monopoly games ended with your piece in jail and your bank account empty, Colorado offers 90 different scratch-off games.
For those who like high stakes, Set for Life offers a top prize of $3.6 million, and hitting the jackpot on $3,000,000 Diamonds and Gold will earn you a three million dollar payout. Both games cost $50 to play.
If you don't want to spend more for a lottery ticket than you would for a pack of gum, games such as Junior Jumbo Bucks, $10,000 Extreme Green, and $10,000 Colorado Cash only cost $1 to play, and all offer $10,000 top prizes.
Giving back
Since 1983, the Colorado Lottery has contributed more than $4 billion to voter-selected initiatives dedicated to protecting the state's natural resources, including parks, trails, and recreation projects.
