Today Swagbucks added a new offer for Long Game, which is an app created to help you in the long game of life.

I'll start off this post by saying that you need to be 18 to complete this offer, and it will require setting up a savings account, which does require full name, address, DOB, and SSN.

Long Game is an app similar to Acorns where you'll deposit money and hodl. The difference here is that they're not buying you investments. Instead they're giving you a savings account. The app has no fees at all, which is good, and it has an interest rate of 0.1%. What's interesting about Long Game is that as you deposit money into the account, you'll earn coins. For example, if you have $1000 in your account, you'll earn 335 coins per week. You can use coins to play games (like scratch cards, lottery, and wheel games) where you can earn some additional prizes. We'll absolutely dive into the return of coins later on in this post.

Swagbucks is currently offering 700 SB to download Long Game, sign up, and make your first deposit.

Link to the offer

The official terms:

Install the LongGame app, connect your bank account, and deposit at least $2 into your new savings account, and earn 700 SB!

Ignore the $2 requirement. The the minimum is $5 to deposit on the app.

I'll add that they do have a referral program. My code is 8MYP8X. You probably won't get anything for using my code. I wouldn't bother with the code unless you really care. I get 1000 coins when you sign up.

So here's the walkthrough for the offer:

1. Download the app.

2. Sign up for the savings account. Again, this requires full name, address, DOB, and SSN.

3. Link a bank account (securely through Plaid).

4. Deposit $5.

5. At this point you should receive credit instantly.

6. If you're not interested in using Long Game anymore, come back in a few days and cash out your $5. Keep reading the post for advice on Long Game.

How To Properly Use Long Game post SwagBucks Offer

The SwagBucks offer is nice, but I'm deciding to play around with this app more for science. I'll start off here by talking about sign up/first week promotions, and later I'll suggest the best use for coins and probability summaries.

At this point I'm assuming you've already made your first deposit. You should have 500 coins in your account, plus whatever bonus you got for your first week deposit (I think it was 3 coins per dollar, up to a certain point).

You might have also noticed that you can earn up to 24 coins per dollar for automatic deposits, up to 3000 coins with a $150 automatic deposit. What I have found is if you schedule a $150 automatic deposit for the next day, you'll get the 3000 coins instantly, and at this point you can simply cancel the automatic deposit.

At this point you probably have anywhere from 3500-4500 coins, which is pretty damn good, considering that an account with $1000 will take 3 months to passively earn that many coins.

Before we go further, I want to give my opinions on Long Game.

If you're thinking about putting all of your savings into this app. Don't. This app might be fun if you have money to casually throw around for fun (and probably not for the long term). A rate of 0.1% will lose you money, since inflation is ~4%. Assume coins are worth nothing. In the long run, long game is a really bad option.

Okay, so let's talk about coins.

I dove into the official rules, and the biggest rules of thumbs here are that you should play games earlier in the day. All games have a daily $ prize cap, and once it is reached, they won't give away cash anymore, and you will only find yourself winning coins. I don't think this will actually be an issue any time soon.

The official rules are the most clear for the "Spin to Win" games, so I'll give you the rundown here.

Check out the official rules yourself here.

They have 4 Spin To Win Games. One costs 80 coins where you can win up to $500. 100 coins for up to $1000, 120 coins for up to 1 BTC, 1000 coins for up to $5000.

I'll start by giving overall odds of winning things here. Sorry if things here are too mathy. I'll try and put things into words.

So these are simply the odds of winning either nothing (1-just take odds of any prize) something, coins, or $/crypto.

Now I'll make another table. On this table you'll see the averages. So for example, this table will average how many/how much coins you'll earn on average, as well as how much $ you'll earn. This calculation takes into consideration the odds of either losing, or winning the alternative.

* For the 3 highest prizes (1 ETH, .1 BTC, 1 BTC), I calculated the current value of the crypto. The average for this will change every minute, so keep this in mind, especially if you're reading this post at a later point.

Alright, so i guess we've concluded it! The best wheel is the 1000 coin wheel since you'll win an average of $0.87!

Eh, not exactly.

Consider the costs to play. One spin of the 1000 coin wheel could alternately be used to spin the 100 coin wheel 10x. Here's a third table, calculating the $0.01 per 100 coins spent to play the game.

So, there we must have it! The 1000 coin wheel is the best value!! Right?

Actually, no. Again.

We can't stop there. The fact that coins can be won--almost like a rebate--means that we have to calculate the value of coins when they are 'reinvested' back into the game. Here's an example scenario. You start playing the 60 coin game with 600 coins. You play 10 rounds. Hypothetically, if all of the coin prizes were instead replaced with losing, you should end with 0 coins and about $0.2916. Oh, but since there are coins in the mix, you should actually end up with about $0.2916 and about 291.5002 coins, which can then be exchanged for 4 more plays and you'll have some coins leftover. From the next 4 plays you'll earn about $0.11664. This cycle continues until you actually run out of coins. Just an FYI, I know that this isn't actually what would happen. The minimum prizes makes it difficult. You'd probably only find results like this over longterm playing averages, or when you're playing with a large sum of coins at one time.

The point here is the the coins won can later be turned into additional cash, and we need to consider that into the totals as well.

The math gets a bit more complicated here, so to make it easy to look at I'm going to give an example as if I were to put 10,000 coins into any of the games using regression of total to determine how much you should earn by recycling coins won back.

So, now we officially have it. Turns out that the best wheel is the 1000 coin wheel, but they're all pretty close.

Finally, the only thing we should try to calculate is how much you can expect to actually make with Long Game (not calculating in the .1% interest at all here).

What's interesting about Long Game is that it doesn't scale at a 1:1 ratio as you deposit more into the app.

When you have a lower account balance, it only takes about $5 to hit an additional 5 coins earned per week. Compare that to $1000. If you have $1000 in your account you'll need to deposit an additional $30 to get 5 more coins per week The amount of coins you'll earn per dollars deposited is somewhat logarithmic, meaning that your dollars are worth less as you deposit more.

The people who will see the best ROI on this app are the people who only have $10 deposited into the app due to the way that it scales. Of course, the people who only have $10 deposited will hardly make anything from this app. However, let's compare things here.

Again, we're not calculating the .1% interest here at all.

You have $10 deposited and you're earning 20 coins per week. A year later you check the app and you have 1040 coins. Based on our conclusion above, you'll put all 1040 coins into the 1000 coin wheel (please do realize that I'm aware that it's impossible to put 1040 coins into the 1000 wheel since it goes in 1000 increments. Let's pretend that this is in the long run, say you do this for 100 years (which again, I'm aware is not possible. Just imagine though, okay?)).

You'll end out with ~$1.04 earned from the wheel. (or you'll probably just get unlucky on your one spin and end up losing, but again, we're thinking in the longrun).

That'll put your balance at $11.04 for the year. For your first year you'll earn over 10% interest on this account, which is really good! And you'll be on schedule to increase your weekly coins by 33.3% in 10 years.

Now let's compare to someone with $1000 deposited.

You'll earn 335 coins per week, so a year later you could check out the app and you'll have 17420 coins. You again put them all into the 1000 coin wheel. In total you'll win ~$17.38.... so that's what? Like 2%? You're losing money.

Conclusion

Don't use Long Game in the Long Game unless you plan on putting not much more than $10 in your account.

As always please do your own research, and if anyone cares to math check me, please do.

Hopefully you found this post helpful.