The grand prize is gone. The tickets are still $10.

A scratch-off is dead when every one of its top prizes has been claimed. The jackpot that's plastered across the ticket art — the $2,000,000, the "$1,000 A Week For Life" — is no longer winnable. And yet the game keeps sitting in the dispenser at the gas station, selling at the same price it always did.

Right now, 18 active Florida games are in exactly this state.

Why are they still for sale?

Because it's allowed, and because there's no reason for the retailer or the state to pull them early:

• Lower prizes still exist. A dead game can still pay $500, $100, $20 — so it's not "worthless," just materially worse than it looks. You're buying a ticket whose headline prize is impossible.
• Ending a game is a deliberate step. Florida sets an official end date and a redemption deadline; until then, unsold tickets stay in circulation. Retailers keep what they were shipped.
• The information exists — online. The state publishes remaining top prizes. But nobody's checking a database at the register.

That's the whole problem: it's legal and fully disclosed, but invisible at the counter. The one place you actually decide what to buy is the one place the information isn't.

The current dead list

These games are still selling with their top prizes gone — sorted by how recently they died:

What to do with this

You don't need to boycott dead games — the smaller prizes are real, and sometimes a dead ticket is still a fine impulse buy. You just deserve to know before you hand over the money, not after you've scratched it.

See the full, always-current list on the dead games page, and check any game's page for its live top-prize status before you buy.