Social and sweepstakes gaming sites offering online slots, casino games, and poker are legal in Colorado. These sites give you the opportunity to play socially and to win cash prizes. They use an innovative coin system and laws designed for sweepstakes contests to stay legal in Colorado and nationwide.
You’ll see more detail on how the popular social/sweepstakes gaming sites stay legal below. This includes a look at the two different types of coins — “Gold Coins” and “Sweeps Coins” — and the relationship between them.
After that, four of the biggest and best social gaming sites are covered. These are Chumba Casino, Luckyland Slots, and Global Poker. The pros and cons of these sites, along with other practical information, can be found at the end of this page.
Top online Sweeps Coins casinos
of Gold Coins for $10
Are social and sweepstakes casinos legal in the United States?
Yes. Everyone can register for a social or sweepstakes casino account and play no-cost games for a chance to win cash prizes if you’re 18 or older and live in most of the states in the country, including Colorado.
Sweepstakes laws are set by individual states. In addition, some sites, such as Global Poker, LuckyLand, and Chumba Casino, are also licensed and regulated by the prestigious Malta Gaming Authority.
Online casino sites use a random number generator to determine the outcome of spins. VGW’s RNG has been guaranteed to be authentically random, ensuring fairness, by an independent certification laboratory.
How do these sites work?
As mentioned above, social casinos sell a type of coins for entertainment (Gold Coins) and they give away redeemable tokens (Sweeps Coins) for free, primarily with purchases of the first kind of token. When you use the redeemable coins to play a game, you can redeem any winnings for cash prizes.
The key part of sweepstakes law is the requirement that you don’t need to purchase anything in order to play no-cost games for a chance at cash prizes. And you don’t. Social and sweepstakes online casinos give away redeemable coins in a number of ways, in addition to complementary amounts that come with purchases of the play currency.
The law says that when redeemable tokens are used in a game of chance — which could be a lotto-style drawing, a virtual Monopoly game or a casino slots game, among others — the owners of these tokens can legally receive prizes, including cash prizes.
To stay within sweepstakes law, sometimes these site use what seems like a different language. For instance, you can’t say that one Sweeps Coin is equivalent to one U.S. dollar, because Sweeps Coins have no monetary worth.
On that same track, you also can’t say you win cash prizes playing sweepstakes games, because you win Sweeps Coins, not real cash. You can redeem the Sweeps Coins you win by playing games for cash prizes. Although you can’t win prizes with play spins, social casino games are a lot of fun to play, and you won’t have any trouble finding a way to use any of the coins that you win. You can even test out new games with your winnings to help you decide whether to play with redeemable currency instead.
Which are the best online social/sweepstakes casino sites?
While there are many online social casinos available and others are currently in development, one of the most experienced operators is Virtual Gaming Worlds. The Australian-based company launched Chumba Casino in 2012, Global Poker in 2016 and LuckyLand Slots in 2019.
This review will take a closer look at Chumba, LuckyLand and Global Poker, along with Woopla Inc.’s sweepstakes casino Funzpoints, which launched in 2018.
While no app is available for these sites, they are all built on completely web-based platforms that you can access from any updated browser on a Mac or PC, along with mobile browsers for Apple and Android smartphones and tablets.
Chumba Casino
VGW was formed in 2010, and Chumba Casino CO launched in 2012 as its first venture. Chumba took some time to get off the ground, but joining up with Facebook in 2017 gave the site a boost.
Now, with more than a million players signed up with the site, many players have reaped over 1 million Sweeps Coins in winnings, redeemable for cash prizes. One player’s lucky spin on a progressive jackpot slot won over 1.8 million Sweeps Coins in 2020.
Initially offering only proprietary games, in 2020, Chumba began offering titles from third-party game studios, such as Reel Play, Golden Rock Studios, and Big Time Gaming-licensed Megaways titles.
Chumba is the only social casino in this review to offer table games. The site offers two versions of blackjack: Back Blackjack, developed in-house, and another variant titled blackjack that’s licensed from Golden Rock.
New players to Chumba receive 2,000,000 Gold Coins and 2 FREE Sweeps Coins just for signing up. You also have the option to secure 10,000,000 Gold Coins and 30 FREE Sweeps Coins for only $10. This package – worth $30 – is available to you without any promo code. Just use one of our links to get started.
LuckyLand Slots
VGW gained access to a large collection of casino slots in 2019 after purchasing the California-based game studio Open Wager. Instead of adding them all to Chumba’s library, VGW incorporated Open Wager’s visually opulent graphics in a brand new site. LuckyLand Slots CO launched later that same year.
New games are developed in-house regularly, with LuckyLand’s exclusive game collection currently consisting of about 40 games. Both the platform and the slots are data-intensive, but well worth the bandwidth if your operating system can handle it.
While Chumba’s games offer plenty of modern advances in the base and bonus games, LuckyLand’s slots are top of the line, with many featuring 3D animations, expanding reels, and walking wilds, among other exciting features.
Although the same system is in use on LuckyLand as Chumba, there are a number of differences between the two sites, primarily with available promotions. LuckyLand extensively promotes its Facebook connection, allowing you to gift up to 50 free spins a day to your online friends, as well as accepting them in return.
Another difference to highlight is LuckyLand’s daily tournaments. Some games will host leaderboard tournaments for both Gold Coins and Sweeps Coins every day. To enter a tournament, you just need to start spinning.
At the end of the day, the top 40 players on the leaderboard receive a share of the prize pool. LuckyLand seeds the tournament prize pool, but it will grow progressively throughout the day as more players join in. LuckyLand also offers a VIP loyalty program that features increasingly larger discounts on purchases of Gold Coins for each tier you reach.
New players to Luckyland Slots receive 7,777 Gold Coins and 10 FREE Sweeps Coins to get them started. You can get 50,000 more Gold Coins – normally valued at $10 – for only $4.99, and you’ll receive 10 more Sweeps Coins for FREE on top.
Funzpoints
From Woopla Inc., a Canadian-based software developer, Funzpoints Casino CO launched on Facebook in mid-2018. The casino’s games are all exclusive, so you won’t find them anywhere else. The site offers a game library of about 20 titles, including sweepstakes casino slots and specialty games, such as keno.
Funzpoints follows sweepstakes law just like the other sites. Still, while all VGW sites operate very similarly, there are several critical differences between Funzpoints and the VGW-operated sites.
Funzpoints uses two kinds of virtual money, as well, although the equivalent of Gold Coins is called Standard Funzpoints, and the sweepstakes entries (equivalent to Sweeps Coins) are Premium Funzpoints. Standard Funzpoints are the same thing as Gold Coins, and Premium Funzpoints are the same thing as Sweeps Coins.
One difference to highlight between VGW sites and Funzpoints is that you can claim cash prizes two ways on Funzpoints:
- You can redeem Premium Funzpoints winnings.
- Forty players will win a share of a $350 real money jackpot drawing daily.
You earn entry tickets into the drawing just by playing games, or as prizes during special mini-games that will pop up when you earn enough points to level up. While most games are locked to players using free Standard Funzpoints to spin, leveling up will help you climb the levels in Funzpoints’ loyalty program and unlock more games.
You can obtain free Standard play money (and entry tickets) by spinning the prize wheel every three hours. All games are unlocked, among other perks, when you spin using Premium Funzpoints. The same benefits are unlocked for 30 days when you spin using purchased Standard Funzpoints.
In addition to larger discounts for higher VIP tiers, the site may offer a Sunday Funzday promotion that gives you an extra $5 worth of free Premium Funzpoints on Sundays; $5 is equivalent to 500 Premium Funzpoints.
All Funzpoints games have a 96.4% return to player ratio and a low volatility rating, which means you’re likely to see low and medium wins often, on average. This helps you earn points and level up pretty quickly.
Funzpoints’ welcome bonus for new players includes a no-purchase bonus of 250 Premium Funzpoints, or $2.50 worth, to try all games out for free. Since these are Premium Funzpoints, all games will be unlocked when playing in Premium mode.
On first purchase, new players also will get two times (2x) the number of Standard Funzpoints and Premium Funzpoints for regularly priced Standard Funzpoints, up to the $20 deal.
How do I join a social or sweepstakes casino?
Signing up with a social casino is as easy as logging in to your Facebook account. As long as you’re 18 or older and a resident of the U.S. or Canada, you are welcome to join any of these legal sites.
How can I get FREE Sweeps Coins?
In addition to bonus FREE Sweeps Coins with Gold Coins purchases, VGW sites give away FREE Sweeps Coins just for logging in to your account once a day, as well as hosting giveaway contests on social media.
You may find discounts on Standard play money purchases with FREE Premium virtual currency on Funzpoints’ Facebook page.
Another way to get FREE Sweeps Coins or Premium Funzpoints is to request them in a letter to each respective company. Note that requests must be in a certain format, so you’ll want to review the site’s terms and conditions before investing in a stamp.
What games can you play on these sites?
While table games are available only on Chumba, all of these social casinos offer top quality slots games, including modern features such as cascading reels, 100K-plus paylines, and state-of-the-art bonus features with several innovative twists.
Chumba and LuckyLand offer progressive jackpot slots, as well, featuring highly lucrative payoffs. You’ll find games with every imaginable type of theme, including pop culture, mystical realms, Old West cowboys, and much more.
Social/sweepstakes online poker sites
VGW launched its second site, Global Poker, in 2016 after licensing a poker client from Cubeia Sweden AB.
The site is popular with aspiring as well as experienced poker players. You’ll find anywhere from around 5,000 to more than 10,000 players seated at Global Poker’s Texas Hold’em or Omaha tables at any particular time, seven days a week, around the clock.
Global Poker welcomes players with a two-part offer. Upon signing up with the promo code FLUSH, you can get 150,000 Gold Coins for $10, plus 30 free Sweeps Coins. After that, get 200,000 Gold Coins for $20 (normally $40), plus 40 more free Sweeps Coins.