Bingo as a game paradigm

Bingo is essentially a simple matching exercise where

1. access by players to the first set of items is under the control of a caller,
2. the second set of items is sampled from a population of items in a one-to-one correspondence with the first set of items.
3. Some players have privileged sets, which make it possible for them to be Big Winners, while others may have second-tier sets which allow them to get Consolation Prizes, and losers are those who went to sleep during the calling.

The aim is to cross off all the items on your card before other players and be a Big Winner. Suspense is created by being able to cross off some, but not all, items being called, and not knowing whether this means you’re going to be a Big Winner or not.

The way bingo organizers can create these conditions, and prevent cheaters from just crossing off all their items and shouting ‘Bingo’, is to select 2 items from the population, putting one in Big Winner sets and the other in the Consolation Prize sets, random sampling other items from the population for the 2 sets of sets, and then calling all the prompts matching the items in the population in random order, leaving the 2 clinchers to last.

Not just numbers and words can be used for prompts and matches. Any item suitable for a (simple) matching exercise is good. For example, translations from L1 to L2, questions and answers, conversation adjacency pairs. Which means it is a very productive game paradigm.

Violation/relaxation of these procedures creates a different game/activity, eg ReverseBingo

See my perl script for creating bingo cards https://github.com/drbean/ttb/blob/master/cards/bingo/bingo.pl

Back to Games