Many of us, perhaps most of adults, have played bingo at one point or another in their lives. Maybe only once or twice, but nevertheless we know the rules – get a bingo card, check off items from your card as they are called out, and try to be the first person to shout out “Bingo!” if you achieve the winning pattern (a line of five items in any direction in most variants of the game, but sometimes other shapes or patterns may be used).
One thing that you may not have thought about, is how bingo cards are created. This is because, for most us, when we played the game, we were simply given a bingo card that was already printed with numbers, and creating a unique bingo card for each player was simply somebody else’s problem.
Today, you will find however that themed versions of bingo are growing in popularity. At Christmas, on July 4th, Halloween, Easter and other holidays, many people like to organize games based around the particular holiday in question. In this case, the bingo cards are in fact printed with words or phrases relating to the particular holiday. Similarly, more and more teachers are now using bingo as a classroom activity in a diverse range of subjects including K-12 Reading lessons, ESL (English as a Second Language), math, science, foreign languages and more – and in this case, bingo cards containing items appropriate for the particular lesson are used.
So how are these custom bingo cards prepared? One possibility is of course to do so manually – a person could prepare bingo cards using pen and paper, or even a word processor, but it would be a very time consuming process. The main alternative is to instead using special bingo card maker software – you enter a list of possible items, specify how many cards you want, click a button and you’re done.
By: Sunil Tanna
While it’s certainly true that there are some people who enjoy playing bingo much more than others, it’s probably also true that most of us have played bingo at some point in our lives. Furthermore, while there are some people who have never actually played the game, I bet if you asked them, most of them would know how to play the game.
With bingo being so universally popular, it’s not really very surprising that there many different variants of the rules, as well as adaptations of the game intended for different circumstances and playing situations. The traditional game of bingo is of course played using bingo cards containing a grid of squares, each square containing a number, and the players’ objective is to be the first person to mark off a line (horizontal, vertical or diagonal) of squares on their card.
There are many ways that game play can be modified, the simplest of which is to change the winning criterion. For example, instead of requiring a single line, players may be required to get two separate lines, a postage stamp shape, all border squares of the card, or even mark off every single square.
More sophisticated variants involve replacing the numbers with other items, such as words, phrases, dates, times, or even math problems. Bingo games using holiday-related words and phrases are popular around holidays like Christmas, Easter, Halloween or July 4th, and other themed versions are very popular in education, including ESL (English as a Second Language) and K-12. One such example of educational variant of bingo is math bingo: cards are printed with math problems, and students must write in the answers to questions (when they question is called out) rather than simply cross off squares.
In order to play themed variants of bingo, you will of course need bingo cards containing the appropriate special items. It can be difficult and expensive to purchase themed bingo cards, and it’s incredibly time consuming to create the manually. The best answer is to get your computer to do the job – with the help of bingo card maker software, it really is very simple to printed unlimited quantities of bingo cards on any topic that you might want.
By: Sunil Tanna
