Stake Original: Tarot (October 2025)

Stake has consistently pushed out new originals month-to-month throughout the year. The latest has arrived, called Tarot, which is another card-based game vaguely similar to Packs in premise. This one has a 2% house edge, four modes and a 5,000x max win on expert difficulty.

Easy Mode Max: 20x (0.07% chance – 1 in 1,429)
Medium Mode Max: 160x (0.0147% chance – 1 in 6,803)
Hard Mode Max: 1,176x (0.0025% chance – 1 in 40,000)
Expert Mode Max: 5,000x (0.0004% chance – 1 in 250,000)

An animated deck of Tarot-like cards gets shuffled into three piles, with the top cards of each then revealed. The cards contain decorative art, an associated word (Swords, Pentacles, Temperance, Death, Cups, etc.) and the all-important multiplier. The values of each of the three displayer cards are multiplied together to arrive at the final outcome. If any of the three cards shows a 0.00x, the entire round is lost.

The odds of hitting the higher multis are much less likely than most of the classic originals including Dice, Mines and Limbo. Hitting even a 49x on Tarot, which I managed once in a series of 2000 plays across various difficulties, is only a 0.15% chance (1 in 667 average). By contrast, a 49x on Limbo or Dice is a 2.02% chance (1 in 49.5 average). The tradeoff, in theory, is that you can get other combos to help keep your balance afloat in Tarot whereas in Limbo or Dice it is all-or-nothing.

Out of curiosity as a first run of this new original, I ran 2000 plays at $1 using a mix of game modes from easy to expert. I did not keep track of how many of each mode I played, but the final outcome is below.

Approximately 86.6% of these games resulted in a < 1.0x return, with many straight-up being 0.00x. I won a single 98x on Hard mode (0.065% chance… Versus 1.01% chance on Limbo or Dice). A few 30-48x sprinkled throughout the plummet downward.

Below are the base card chance rates for all difficulty modes. A combination of three such outputs will be presented per play and multiplied together. For example, on easy mode you might get a 0.4x (60% chance), 1.10x (10% chance) and 5.00x (7% chance) which would give you a combined total of 2.2x (1.86% chance).

On easy mode you have a 76% chance per play of hitting a net loss between 0.00x and 0.80x return, with 19% of plays resulting in 0.00x. On expert mode, you have a 90.17% chance per play of hitting a net loss between 0.00x and 0.9x, with 71.91% of plays resulting in 0.00x.