Like scratching scratchers but don't actually want to blow money on the lotto? Try the demo for Scritchy Scratchy, a ridiculously moreish clicker game

I've never actually purchased a scratchcard with my own money—all of my experience taking a coin to that crumbly, silvery coating comes from gift cards and the odd scratchcard a family member has bought me for my birthday.

Minus the gambling part of scratchcards, I actually think they're kinda neat though. An interactive experience with an air of mystery enveloped in bright colours and cartoony drawings. If I could scratch away with reckless abandon without thinking of the gambling of it all you bet I would. Unfortunately, I can't do that in real life, but I can do it in the ridiculously morish clicker game Scritchy Scratchy.

I admit I was quite disappointed when I first booted up the game. I had expected to go right into the scratchers, but instead I'm forced to pick up a spaghetti-coated plate and scrub it clean for a few pennies. Scratchcard money doesn't make itself, I suppose.

Once I'd washed a few dishes—and broken some, a light introduction to Scritchy Scratchy's luck system—I was finally bestowed my first scratchcard. A simple little thing with three boxes, and all I have to do is match two of 'em. I either win something or I win nothing. Pretty easy!

I don't know whether I'm rocking a noodle arm or what, because scratching these is taking a mighty long time. That's where Scritchy Scratchy's three main stats start to come into play. I can spend money earned from scratchers to make my scratching area larger, strengthen my scratching arm to reveal each symbol sooner, or improve my odds of getting a bigger prize and, eventually, avoiding the penalties.

The last one is what I found the most interesting and often the most important. Not all scratchcards in Scritchy Scratchy are made equal. Some come with icons that, if I unveil them, will actually take money away from me. It meant that I had to stop scraping away with reckless abandon and carefully chip away at certain cards—being able to discern which ones would bankrupt me and being able to avoid them before fully revealing them.

It also brings a bit of strategy into play when I obtain the auto-scratcher, a little doo-dad that will assist me with cards while I manually take to others. But it'll also fully reveal every symbol, which meant that if I started feeding it scratchcards with massive penalties while I was still relatively low in luck, I would soon find myself in the minus.

Eventually I found a nice rhythm of feeding the auto-scratcher relatively low-stakes cards while taking the higher-risk ones myself. Scratchcards also slowly level up as you buy more and more of them, so I was eventually using the auto-scratcher money as fodder while I poorly attempted to level up the stronger scratchcards that were often giving me zero winnings.

After half an hour of furious scratching, I was met with a strange-looking scratchcard called Final Chance. In my foolishness, I scratch it off fully without thinking. It's three skulls. I get a game over. Oopsie.

It's not all bad news, though. In fact, getting a game over ended up being a good thing: Scritchy Scratchy also has a skill tree that became available to me after my first run. I can spec into extra stats to start my run with, or kick things off by automatically having the auto-scratcher at my side.

Being able to prestige through runs makes the future ones far smoother, and before I knew it I was making absolute bank. Unfortunately, the Final Chance scratchcard still eluded me—it turns out that you can't actually win with it in the demo, which makes sense as I was starting to wonder if Lunch Money Games had blessed me with an entire game's experience for free.

There's no release date for Scritchy Scratchy yet—the game's Steam page just says that it's "coming soon"—but you can bet I'm already preparing to waggle my mouse back and forth over hundreds of scratchcards when it does finally launch.