As someone who loves sats but would also like more of them, I've been aware of the various games that Thundr makes for a while, and decided to check them out. So last Friday, I downloaded the entire set, with the goal to play them a lot, but not obsessively over the next few days. Basically, when I'd normally play another casual game (taking the bus into work, or waiting for a process to finish on my computer, or mulitasking while watching TV), I stuck to Thundr games.

I have both an iPad and an Android phone, and played on both devices.

(Note: While there are referral links available for the games, I'm choosing not to use them here -- they seem to not be in the spirit of SN, even if they're not technically disallowed. You can find each of them easily enough in either app store.)

The winning/payout process (regardless of game):

Each time you play a game, you can (and likely will) earn "tickets." Each hour on the hour, there's a drawing for a jackpot of sats, and all of your tickets are automatically entered in the drawing. The jackpot will usually be a few hundred sats, but there are also tons of smaller prizes, enough that every player with a ticket will win a prize (you can see the number of tickets, the size of the jackpot, and the number of players). Prizes can be as low as 1 sat, and realistically, I think most of my prizes were in the 4-7 range.

When the drawing happens, each player can only win one prize, and the app always awards the player the larger prize. So if you win both the 77 sat prize and the 4 sat prize, you get 77 sats, and the 4 sat one is redrawn (this happens behind the scenes, so the players never see it).

When you log in after winning a prize, the number of sats you have is visible at the top of the screen, and you can tap it to initiate a withdrawal. Withdrawals have to be within five days of winning the prize, but you can let rewards pile up to withdraw them at once (because let's face it, withdrawing 50 sats feels a lot more satisfying than withdrawing 3). One key thing to note that is that you have to use a lightning wallet that they support and which is installed on your device. This generally isn't a big issue -- they support Strike, Cash App, Muun, WoS, and others -- but if you want to just enter your lightning address for a non-mobile wallet like Alby, you're SOL.

I mean, you knew it was coming, right?

The games are all free to play, so naturally they need to be making money somewhere to afford those sats. There are in-game purchases, although they're actually pretty low-key (almost never pushed by the game). You can purchase some premium currency (stuff that normally impacts in-game things, like faster power-ups), and you can pay $2 to turn off most ads. You can also buy new avatars and a few other things.

And of course there are ads. You get an ad every two or three games, and there's often a way to watch an ad for some sort of bonus (tickets you missed, or to continue after dying). All things considered, I don't find the ads very obrtrusive, or any worse than what I'm used to in other games. Though I swear to god, I'm eventually going to have nightmares from all those Gossip Harbor ads I've sat through.

Bitcoin Bounce is a quick game where you bounce a ball across platforms, trying to pick up tickets as well as power-ups for points along the way. I'm sure I've seen the mechanic used in other games; you tap to have your ball shoot down as if gravity has increased, then let go to bounce back up, always moving forward. Each game is quick, and it works really well on a phone (since you only need one finger anywhere on the screen). Not as good on the iPad, but still fun.

Bitcoin Snake is just like Nokia Snake. The only difference is that each block you pick up to increase your length is a ticket at first, so if you get to it in time, you get a ticket as well as an extra body segment. This is another one that's better on the phone than the ipad, just because it's easier to control in a smaller space.

Tetro Tiles is just the game 1010, a puzzle game that was huge a few years back. You have to place assorted shapes on a 27X27 grid of blocks and try to fill rows, columns, and squares. Tickets come automatically as you fill them, so don't impact gameplay at all. This plays just as well on both devices.

Club Bitcoin: Solitaire is another one that's exactly what you'd expect. It's standard klondike/canfield solitaire, the same one you've been playing on computers for decades. You get tickets for each card you get placed in the top area. Both this and Tetro Tiles offer a multiplayer tournament option that I don't find particularly interesting (I like my casual games casual).

Turbo 84 is an endless runner where you're driving a car and are trying to pick up tickets, speed boosts, and premium gems that can get you different cars and stuff. I love endless runners, but this is just dull, by far the least engaging of the games for me. It does play better on the iPad, but still the one I enjoyed the least.

Bitcoin Bay is by far my favorite of the games. It's basically Bubble Witch Saga (which in turn is a rip-off/"homage" to Snood and Bubble Bobble/Bust-a-Move). You shoot different colored items up to match and destroy groups of blocks. There is both a "relaxed" mode which is aimed at generating tickets, and a "adventure" mode where you go through different levels (just like BWS). There are various power-ups you can buy with in-game gems or by watching ads at certain points.

So after playing semi-casually for three days, here's where my Strike wallet (created just to play these games) stood as of Monday morning:

That includes some time playing on the commute to/from work on Friday, during downtime at work, and a lot of casual time playing on the weekend. I'd say I played most games at least enough to be entered in 10-15 drawings a day, but rarely played any of them more than two or three times in any one-hour drawing period.

Well, the answer, as always, is "it depends." :-) 828 sats over three days comes down to 276 a day. If you manage that over an entire year, that's 102951 (103227 in a leap year like this one). Obviously, 100K sats is nothing to sneeze at.

That said, that requires some dedication. For each of those days, there was almost surely a better way to get that many sats. Hell, I posted a link yesterday that netted me 1227 sats so far, and the time spent finding, posting, and adding a bit of additional info to that link was less than one game of Tetro Tiles.

So if you're thinking of this as an efficient way to stack sats, it's probably not. Even if you can't find a better direct way to stack sats, there's surely way to get fiat to convert that's more efficient, and your time is also worth something.

But, if you take the same approach here as with Fountain for podcast listening, and simply do something enjoyable and happen to get some sats from it, it becomes a lot more palatable.

My approach, moving forward: Keep Bounce and Snake on my phone, Tetro Tiles and Bitcoin Bay on my iPad, and play them when the mood strikes (I don't like solitaire in general, and obviously am not a fan of Turbo 84). It likely means something closer to 100 sats a day, but 100 sats for stuff I'm doing anyway for pleasure is a better deal than 276 that feels like work.

Obviously, YMMV, and everyone's got their own preferences when it comes to games. This is just my experience.