Lottery spices offerings with new sports plays

Christian Teja of the Massachusetts Lottery joined Boston Herald Radio’s “Morning Meeting” show yesterday to talk about special scratch tickets for the Patriots and other New England sports teams. Here are excerpts:

Q: What do we have in connection with the Lottery and the Patriots going on?

A: We have a $5 instant ticket. You could win up to $250,000 instantly. Now the game’s been out for a couple of years already so there’s one such prize remaining. However, we do have second chance drawings in this game so any non-winning tickets you have you could enter. The top prize in that is trips for two to Miami for 10 years — an away-game trip to Miami, you get to see them play against the Dolphins down there for 10 years.

Q: You’ve also got all sorts of other sports-themed lottery tickets?

A: We do. This is a busy time of the year for that. We’ve got Bruins and the Celtics both going on, those are both $2 tickets. You could win up to $50,000. We’ve got a Red Sox ticket, another $2 ticket with a $50,000 top prize. All of those games have second-chance drawing opportunities where you could win merchandise, tickets, gameday experiences — get on the field, on the ice, things like that. And then the other ticket we have over here is the $5 Ultimate Garden Party ticket, which was a cool ticket we did a couple of years ago and there’s one second-chance drawing left with that. The prize in that is two tickets to every event at the TD Garden for an entire year, so every Bruins game, every Celtics game, every concert, ice shows and all that stuff.

Q: How long has this been going on?

A: The first Red Sox ticket, I believe, was back in 2005 and that was the first Major League Baseball team to have an instant scratch ticket and then similarly I think the Patriots was the first NFL ticket when we were kind of on the cutting edge as we have been in a lot of areas over the 45-year history of the Lottery.

Q: You talked about a new Corvette theme and a new sort of additional gameplay scratch ticket, when are those coming out?

A: Yeah, in April. I think the Corvette one is going to be earlier in the month of April and then the other two, the $30 ticket and the extra play one, will be later in the month.

Q: So $225 million you said, was that for Powerball or Mega Millions?

A: That was for Powerball. Mega Millions was recently hit so it’s down to $20 million, that’s (today).

Megabucks Doubler is another kind of component to the game, but $9.9 million or so.