Nine Rings

This minigame was part of the Dragon Festival. The Boardwalk games appeared again October 20 to 22, 2006, and may return in the future.

Rules
Nine rings are organized in a 3 x 3 layout in which contestants may stand. Each round costs ten tickets. Every eight seconds, one ring is randomly chosen as the winner. Players standing in that ring are awarded 25 tickets if it is the center, 40 if it is on the side, or 55 if it is a corner. Standing in an adjacent ring to the winning ring awards fifteen tickets.

Teilah organizes games into groups of nineteen rounds. Each full cycle takes approximately three minutes to run with a momentary pause to attract new players between cycles.

Odds
The odds of this game will return 17 for every 18 tickets spent regardless of which circle you stand on. Standing on a corner circle will increase the rate of losses for those hoping to achieve both the Lucky and Unlucky titles simultaneously, but standing in corner circles increases the chance of having to go buy more tickets earlier resulting from a bad string of luck. In this game, it does not matter where you stand if you want to get the Lucky title.

You gain on average 9.4 tickets per round no matter which circle you are on, and you always lose 10. This equates to 3572 tickets gained per hour (at a cost of 228 tickets forever lost per hour), which means that on average, it requires 14 hours (and 12.8 stacks of tickets lost) to earn 50,000 tickets towards each title:


 * 1) Charmed: 14 hours and 48 platinum (spent on tickets that are forever lost)
 * 2) Lucky: 28 hours and 96 platinum
 * 3) Favored: 70 hours and 240 platinum
 * 4) Prosperous: 140 hours and 480 platinum
 * 5) Golden: 280 hours and 960 platinum

Because the entire Dragon Festival event was only 120 hours long, statistically, the maximum title you likely could have earned during the Dragon Festival is Favored. This implies that gambling minigames will either become a permanent fixture or will be featured again in future events.

See also Rings of Fortune for a 4 x 4 variation. See Luck titles guide for more detailed analysis.

Translation mistake
There is a mistake in the German, French, Italian, Spanish and Japanese translation. According to those you gain 50 tickets when winning in a corner. That's not true. All the other language state the right amount: 55