tombola.com > Reviews > How To Make Money In The New Year

Author's product rating:   

Frequency of updates	Good,
Security & Privacy	Excellent
Spread of bets available	Satisfactory
Payment plans	Average
Fairness of rules & clauses	Good
Search facility	Good

Advantages:	It's free, entertaining and keeps me out of mischief
Disadvantages:	I never win, and I had to look up how to spell mischief

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I’m not sure how I ended up on tombola.com but somehow I did, probably a year and a half ago. Since then I’ve played on and off when I’ve got bored at work, or when I’m feeling lucky, but to this day I have not won a penny. Zilch. Absolutely nothing. But I still keep playing…..

Click onto tombola.com and you’ll be presented with their international homepage. You can chose to come from the USA, the UK, Germany, France, Spain or the rest of the world, or you can go straight to the UK page my typing uk.tombola.com to start with. Navigating the site is simple: there’s a column permanently down the left hand side which lists the games on offer (see below) plus links to the log in page, pages about the site and so on. The colour scheme throughout is a simple, non-confrontational yellow and red – nice and appealing without being in your face.

You have to log in before you can play a game, either by clicking on the “log in” link or by selecting a game to play, since both take you straight to the log in page. There isn’t a “register/sign up” link, but if you’re new, follow the log in instructions and you’ll soon come across the new member’s link. Signing up takes only a few minutes – you need an email address (which becomes your user name), password and permanent address (for when (if?) you win).

Tombola.com is not a tombola, virtual or otherwise. There are no barrels to spin and screwed up raffle numbers to pick. Instead there are a number of games, which change from time to time. The one thing they all have in common though, is the need for luck.

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The 5 games on the site at the moment are:

HAMSTER RACE

Just as you’d expect from a title like that, this is the place to see hamsters slugging their guts out to get to the other side of the finishing line. It’s a bit like the horse races you get in amusement arcades, where for 10p you can bet on various colours winning the race - and it’s almost always number 1 or 2 which only pay out 10p anyway. You are assigned hamsters that will come in 1st and 2nd, but you can’t choose them. Not really an interactive game as such, more a click the button and see what happens. If your 1st place hamster comes 1st you win a 5 GBP Amazon voucher, and if both your specified hamsters come in their assigned places, you win 1000 GBP. Needless to say this doesn’t happen very often. The hamsters aren’t that cute to look at (and have odd names – Hammy, Spike, Patch, Max, Tiny and Stripe) and the whole arena now seems to have been taken over by Paddy Power, a bookmaker who sponsor this game - at the end you’re offered a free 10 GBP bet with them, but only after you’ve signed up the same amount of your own money. Not my personal favourite.

HANG ON

In this game, you’re confronted with 8 blobby monster things hanging on to balloons. You burst these by clicking on them, and in doing so reveal a cash amount, ranging from 1000 GBP to a 5 GBP Amazon voucher (not really cash then). If you get 3 of the same one, you win that amount. All the fun of popping balloons without the terrible bang :-)

SPIN TO WIN

This is set up like a typical one-arm bandit amusement arcade machine. You click on the window to spin, and if you get a line (horizontally, vertically or diagonally) you win. Prizes range from 5000 GBP to, surprise surprise, a 5 GBP Amazon voucher.

I SCRATCH

A bit like the cards that fall out of magazines along with loads of other junk inserts, this is a scratch game with a difference. There are 9 panels to scratch (click the left button on your mouse and drag it back and forth over each a few times) and if you uncover 3 matching ones you win – again, 5000 GBP to 5 GBP Amazon. Although the game itself stays the same, the theme varies, from dinosaurs to animals to toys for example.

FETCH

The only game that doesn’t operate on the tombola site, click on the name and you’re taken over to lycos to play. If the animated dog catches the animated Frisbee you “throw” by clicking the button, it gets added to the pile. If he catches 3 of the same colour you win. Usually 8 Frisbees are thrown, with 5 or 6 being caught. The rest, the dog misses (and goes sprawling on his tummy) or they get stuck up in the lovely animated tree or, erm, turn into flying saucers complete with little green men, which then disappear.

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None of the games require, or even allow skill. They are all preprogrammed games of luck, and the only participating required on your part if the clicking of a button. You can play as many times as you want each day, but the games and results remain the same for your user name. From day to day though these do change, so you’ve 35 chances a week to win. On the site you can find a list of the winners from previous days – yesterday, for example, 15 people won. Of those 15, 12 won 5 GBP vouchers, 2 won 20 GBP and one 50 GBP. The odds are obviously not all that great - 15 winners out of a whole country mean that the chances of it being you are pretty slim, but hey, someone has to win, don’t they?

Of all the gaming sites on the net, this is one of the ones I prefer. The advertising, although present, is not OTT, and there are very rarely pop ups. All the games are easy to play (unless you haven’t figured out how to use your mouse yet hard) and the animation is nice and friendly. There are no costs involved on your part, so unless you get paid millions per second for output at work, there are worse ways to spend a couple of minutes a day.

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Extra Stuff :

The site claims to have given away more than £1 500 000 is price money although I’m assuming they’ve spent less than this since they’ll no doubt be getting their Amazon vouchers at a reduced rate. Like I said, I’ve never won, but I know others have, so why don’t you all flood my comments page and make me jealous?

They have a refer-a-friend scheme called Playmates whereby if your friends sign up, every time they win cash you’ll also get a 20 GBP cash payment – something for nothing, eh?

You can get full details of their privacy policy at http://uk.tombola.com/privacy.asp before you give them your details.

The price levels vary depending on the country you’re from, with the UK being pretty much the highest. Some of the American ones are significantly lower, for example Hang On, but with the European sites, they’re about our level, assuming an exchange rate of 1.5 EUR = 1 GBP

You can contact the company, should you ever want to, in the following ways:

Email : tommy.uk@tombola.com

Write to : tombola Ltd.
Wylam Wharf Low Street
Sunderland
Tyne & Wear
SR1 2AD
United Kingdom

Some of the questions below like payment plans are utterly irrelevant - just ignore them.