Bingo!

I enjoy playing Words With Friends, Draw Something and Song Pop on my iPad, but sometimes I get bored waiting for my family and friends to have their go. I decided to explore games that I could play without an opponent. 

I’ve played Angry Birds, Sudoko, Slots and Bingo. Every game I play is free and I enjoy working out how to play the game, and then the challenge of mastering it. Then I found a bingo game that totally baffled me. It’s called Bingo 90. 

At first I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to play the maximum number of tickets (24), because there are only six tickets on a page. The numbers are called pretty quickly, so it was impossible to flick through four pages of tickets each time a new number was called.

Then I realised that I could buy the maximum number of tickets, because I don’t mark the numbers off. The numbers are automatically marked off for me.

It even moves my cards about for me. As each card fills, the ones with only a couple to go are moved to the front page with a tag attached to it – ‘2tg’, ‘3tg’, etc – so I know how many are left to go on each one. I thought that maybe that was so I could hit bingo if and when it happened, but that wasn’t to be either. The game does that for me too. 

I then wondered if the appeal was something else that involved sound as I usually play without sound (unless a game requires it), so I turned the sound on. After a couple of games I had to turn it off, because the lovely Englishman that calls the numbers was really starting to get on my nerves.

I’m not new to bingo. As a child I spent many mornings in the bingo halls with my mother. At first I would colour in while she played bingo and then as I got a little older I was allowed to play, starting with one book and then graduating to two and three as my confidence grew.

One of the things I loved about bingo was the funny sayings they had for a ‘few’ of the numbers. Kelly’s eye number one, two fat ladies 88, and my favourite, legs eleven, because half the people in the bingo hall would wolf whistle when it was called.

Unfortunately, Bingo 90 took it too far. The lovely Englishman soon became the annoying Englishman because he had a saying for every number and many of them made no sense. They were obviously just made up to rhyme with the number.

38 Christmas cake – not a perfect rhyme, but why 38, was that how many cakes he ate last Christmas?

73 queen bee – the bingo numbers go up to 90, so why is 73 the queen bee and not 83?

Is there a store that sells lollies that is well known for the number 74, because 74 is followed by the words candy store. His accent is definitely English and they call it a sweet shop, so why's he using the American terminology 'candy'.

Number 10 Tony’s den – which Tony? Tony Blair, Tony Curtis, or is it a Tony that ran an opium den in China? 

I can’t even withdraw the money I’ve won, so I ask why. Why do people play a game that involves doing nothing? 

I suppose Bingo 90 might be fun for blind people, but they still have to see what they’re doing to buy the tickets in the first place, so they can’t play unless someone else starts the game for them. Even then, they won’t know if they’ve won, because the annoying Englishman doesn’t announce the name of the winner when he says bingo.

I’ll have to ponder the question of why a little later. It’s time to go for a run, so please excuse me while I sit on the couch and watch a jogging app on my iPad.