How baby shower bingo saved my life 
… I’ve had the fortune/misfortune to host 11 different baby showers in the past three years thanks to co-workers, friends, and family members getting pregnant (when you’re at the age, everyone is doing it). One thing I’ve learned is that games are absolutely essential to keeping the party moving forward and making sure everyone is having a good time. I know of almost no other time when people will be coming together for such an intimate party, yet having so many people possibly not knowing each other. My last baby shower I held had mother-in-laws trying to talk with 18-year-old office friends of the mommy-to-be, talking with cousins from across the state. It was awkward. That is, until…
Until I got the games out, everyone was just standing around making really bad small talk. But then I opened up a few bottles of wine (none for the mommy-to-be) and started a game of Baby Shower Bingo. Everyone knows how to play so we went straight into the game. And after the ladies saw that they could win some nice prizes (top prize was a $30 gift certificate to Victoria’s Secret, but we had lots of $5 gcs to Starbucks).
The wine helped a lot too, and a few of the ladies started getting pretty animated and at one point, someone fell out of her chair trying to be the first person to yell BABY SHOWER BINGO! We all had a great laugh.
I’ve found the best way to do baby shower bingo is to just buy the pre-made cards online. There are lots of places to get free ones, but they looked terrible when I downloaded them, and I just didn’t have time to make my own for the last party. I’d made my own in the past, but after just buying some, it was so easy that I’ll never go back.
I hope this helps a few of you out there, games are the key and can be lots of fun with the help of a little wine and some fun prizes.
By: Marisa Meidle
Most people are familiar with the game of bingo, although, to be fair, many of us think of it only as a kids game or a game played by seniors at social events. While I wouldn’t want to deny that the game is played in these situations, bingo can be a lot of fun for people of all ages, and has also found use in classrooms as an educational tool.
The basic idea of bingo is that each player is given a bingo card. The card contains squares, within in each of which, is a randomly selected number. A bingo caller reads out numbers in a random order, and players mark off the corresponding squares on their cards. The objective of the game is to be the first player to achieve a winning combination of marked off squares – depending on the particular variant of bingo being played, this may for example be one or more straight lines going all the way across the bingo card.
One of the reasons why bingo can be adapted to different situations is that you don’t have to play using cards with numbers. Instead of numbers, bingo cards could be printed with words, phrases or even musical symbols. Thus the game can be adapted to different holiday themes such as Christmas, July 4th, New Year, or Halloween, to social events such as baby showers or wedding showers, to the classroom, by using bingo cards containing items chosen by the teacher, whether it be math problems (that the student must solve in order to mark them off), music symbols (that students must recognize), or even foreign language words (that students must translate).
To play a variant of bingo you will of course need to have special bingo cards with the items of your choice. You can create these by hand if you want to, but if you need a lot of bingo cards, it can be a lot of work. An easy solution is to use your computer – with the help of appropriate bingo card creator software, you just need to enter the list of words, phrases or items that you want, and the computer can generate the bingo cards for you with just a few mouse clicks.
By: Sunil Tanna
