Every score on BetterChecked is a number somebody had to earn. This page says how: what we test, with whose money, how four marks become one score, and what gets a site a warning or thrown off the ranking.
What we review
Mystery box and pack opening sites. The mechanic is the same everywhere: a fixed item list, a printed percentage next to each item, one roll, then you ship the item or sell it back.
We are affiliates of some of them. Sign up through our link and we may earn a commission, at no cost to you. That pays for the site and for part of the testing. It does not buy a score. The details sit in our affiliate disclosure.
Does a partnership move a site? Never the score. In our ranking of mystery box sites the order changes only when a site does. On some themed lists a placement can reflect a partnership, and the page says so where it happens.
The hands-on test, step by step
Scout first. Before any money moves we read the terms, the fairness page, the drop tables and the cashier. The maths on a drop table gives us the house edge before we open a single box.
Sign up through our own link. We create the account the way a reader would, through our referral link, with our own promo code. So we see what you see: the free box, the deposit bonus, the fine print.
Deposit our own money. How much? On the sites we have followed longest, LuxDrop, PackDraw, Cases.gg and RillaBox, we spend hundreds of dollars at a time, regularly, to re-test features and check fairness. A new listing gets $10 to $100, depending on demand, what the site offers and our gut feeling.
The money is ours. No site decides what we open or when, and no site sees a review before you do.
Open everything once. Cheap boxes, one expensive one, a battle against a bot and one against a real player, the upgrader, whatever else the site runs. Each mode goes into a log: what went in, what came out, what it was worth sold back.
Try the exit. Sell-back first, because the rate a site pays for your pull decides what a box is really worth. Then a withdrawal or a shipping order where the balance allows it. Most complaints about these sites start at the exit, so we look hardest there.
Ask support something real. A ticket with a question we already know the answer to. We note who answers, how fast, and whether the answer was right. We keep screenshots of all of it, usernames cropped.
Some tests are small: a few dollars, the cheapest boxes, and a note of what other players pulled. A review always says how much went in.
The reviews of LuxDrop, PackDraw, RillaBox, Royale.gg, Cases.gg, Boxed.gg, EmpireDrop, Lootbox.com, Pullbox.gg and MrLoot each carry a section on our own deposit, to the cent. Our Royale.gg review is the biggest so far: every mode played, one watch, a drawer full of one-cent vouchers.
How we check a roll is fair
Provably fair is a promise, and we test the promise. A fair site hashes its server seed before you open, lets you set a client seed and counts your openings with a nonce. Once the seed is revealed, anyone can recompute the roll.
So we do. Our own openings, the revealed seed, the site’s own verifier code, the maths run off the site. If the ticket matches, the roll was fair. If not, the review says so in bold.
The worked example is our post Is Royale.gg legit?: every opening we recomputed matched. A site with no seeds, no hash and no verifier gets a plain sentence saying so, and its trust mark pays for it.
The score out of 10
Every review ends in four marks, each out of 10: trust and fairness, box variety and games, bonuses and promotions, customer support. The overall score is their average.
The average is arithmetic. The marks are judgement. Trust weighs printed odds, a verifier we could run, a company we can name, withdrawals that arrive. Variety is what you can open and what a pull is worth sold back. Bonuses are what a new account gets. Support is whether a human answers, and how fast.
How much is formula and how much is us? Honestly, a lot is us. Years on these sites shape the marks, and a site that felt wrong in the test loses a point for it. We would rather say that than pretend the score fell out of a spreadsheet.
Under the score, every review carries a details box: owner, game modes, payment methods in and out, the fairness system, odds and RTP, support channels, restricted countries, launch year, Trustpilot. “Tested by BetterChecked” in the fairness row means our own money went through the site.
How the ranking order comes about
Our ranking is not the scores sorted. The score says how a site did in its test. The rank says where we would send you first.
A site built for one hobby or one country sits below its marks, because most readers cannot use it. A newcomer with a strong test starts below a site that has paid out for years. Trustpilot comes second to our own test, since it mostly tracks whether a site asks for reviews.
The order moves when a site moves: a feature we re-tested, a withdrawal that stopped arriving, an owner that changed. Not when a partnership starts or ends.
Warnings, and when a site comes off the ranking
Two things earn the red warning on a review: unpaid withdrawals, or a site that has closed. The warning swaps the button to the site for one to its alternatives, and the review stays up: a reader searching that name deserves the story, not a blank page.
A warned site that still runs keeps a place at the bottom of the ranking. A site that stays closed for a month comes off the ranking altogether, and its review stays as the record.
It is our judgement, not a court’s, so we say what we saw and when.
Promo codes
We collect the codes that work on a site and show them, ours and the site’s own. Some are tied to our affiliate account and earn us a commission when you use them, not every one does. For each code we check that an account accepts it and write down what the terms say it gives you. A code that stops working comes off the page.
Each code card says when it was last checked. That is the date we last edited the page, and we edit it on the monthly run, when a site changes its terms, and when a reader tells us a code failed.
A bonus softens the house edge, it never removes it. Mystery boxes are entertainment, not a way to make money. If they stop being fun, GambleAware is the place to go.
Updates and corrections
Reviews age badly in this industry: terms change, processors vanish, owners change hands. So every page shows its last-updated date, and in the first week of every month we run through the ranking: codes, positions, Trustpilot, anything a site announced.
Found a mistake? Write it in the comments under the page. No login needed. We read every comment, sometimes ask back for a screenshot or a date, and when the correction holds we fix the page and say so in the thread.
Who writes BetterChecked
Three people. Florian is the lead editor and maintains the site. Lukas performed many of the tests. Ilias wrote many of the posts. All three have tested sites, written reviews and lists and edited each other’s work. It is a collaborative effort. You can meet us on our About page.
Our opinions are ours, and biased, as our editorial policies say: we use these sites ourselves and like some more than others. The test is how we keep the bias honest.
Join other top mystery box sites and work with us.