December 1 – Bingo Birthday Month!

nPosted on December 1, 2019

Key Points

nYou probably know about the game of chance called Bingo, in which players have cards with various numbers on them, a caller randomly picks numbers, and players cover or mark the picked numbers. When a player comes up with a winning combination of covered numbers, they call out “Bingo!” and that round of the game is over.

There are a lot of variations of and names for this game, and the history of the game goes way back to around 1530, in Italy. It was called Il Gioco del Lotto d’Italia (“The Game of Lottery of Italy”), and it was so popular that it spread to France, where it was called Le Lotto. By the 1700s (historians believe), the game had spread to Great Britain and other parts of Europe.

nThe game mutated a bit in Germany; it was modified to teach kids multiplication and spelling and even history, and it was called Tombola (which doesn’t sound German to me!).

Bingo being called bingo probably got its start in the United States. An American man named Hugh J. Ward invented the numbers-on-a-card game as a carnival pastime.

n(Or…maybe someone else in either Britain of the U.S. invented the modern version and called it Bingo, and Ward’s version is the one that caught on and became all the rage?)

nThe U.S. game of Bingo has 5 x 5 cards that look like this:

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nIt has 75 balls (or tiles, or whatever) that the caller randomly picks and announces.

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This kind of ball-mixer-upper is very popular for
large-scale community Bingo games.

nIn some versions of Bingo, players cover the picked numbers with tiles or chips:

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nBut the most common modern Bingo version involves daubers that mark the picked number with translucent ink (translucent ink is see-through, so everyone can see that it really WAS the picked number – this wouldn’t work with India ink!!):

nIn the U.K., Bingo involves longer 9 x 3 cards and 90 balls:

Other names for Bingo, or games that are a lot like Bingo, include Lotto and Beano (in the latter, picked numbers are marked with dry beans). In Quebec, the game is called Kinzo, and in India it’s called Tambola – which is really similar to the German name!?!

nSpeaking of the German version of Bingo, have you been wondering how someone can make Bingo educational? Well, wonder no more: this article has loads of different examples of educational Lotto type games.

Bingo can be used for knowledge that can be paired up, or that
can be tested with matching tasks. In the state capitals game
above, the caller picks a card from a shuffled deck and reads
the state name on that card. The kids have to look to see if they
have the capital city of that state. For example, if the caller says,
“Delaware,” the player with this particular card would mark Dover,
which appears in the third row.

But that player is out of luck if the next three picked states are
Hawaii, Alaska, and New Jersey, because those states’ capitals
(Honolulu, Juneau, and Trenton) do not appear on this card.

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Happy Bingo, everyone!!

n(By the way, we are not sure specifically when the first Bingo-like game was played, nor do we know the specific date when the first game called Bingo was played. So someone must have just arbitrarily chosen a month to celebrate the game’s birth month – we have no idea when that would be!)