Bingo: rules, patterns and printable cards

Bingo is the quickest game in Anubis City to learn. You get a card with 24 numbers around a free space, balls come out one at a time, and you cover the numbers you have. The first card to finish a row, a column or a diagonal wins the Line; the first card covered completely wins the Full card. There is nothing to decide during a game, which is exactly why people play it while they chat.

In the Hall of Seshat you choose between two kinds of hall. In AUTO the numbers mark themselves and a ball comes every 3 seconds. In MANUAL you mark them yourself and have to press BINGO! before anyone else, with 8 seconds between balls. A card costs 500, 5,000 or 50,000 free debens, and you can play up to four at once.

• How to play — the rules of our halls step by step, with one game played out ball by ball.
• Printable card generator — real 75-ball cards for a bingo night at home or in class, plus a caller’s sheet.
• Patterns — fourteen shapes from four corners to blackout, and how many balls each one takes.
• 75 or 90 balls — American bingo, British tickets and Russian lotto side by side.
• Calls — “legs eleven”, “two fat ladies” and the lotto sayings, with honest notes on where they come from.
• History — from the lottery of Genoa to carnival “beano” and bingo in old British cinemas.

We ran 200,000 games through the same card and ball functions the game uses. With one card, any line takes 41 balls on average and the full card almost 73. In a typical game in our hall — your cards plus the AI residents’ cards, eleven to fourteen in all — the Line goes at about ball 25 and the Full card at about ball 68. An AUTO game lasts around four minutes from countdown to results.

One more number is worth knowing before you buy four cards. The pot is made of every card in the game and nothing is taken off the top, so on average a card brings back exactly what it cost. More cards give you more chances to win, not better odds for each card.