During the various lockdowns many of us have turned to seeing friends and family on Zoom , Facetime and a number of other video calling applications. We want that face to face contact and we want to try our best to replicate real life meetings to socialise, keep happy and feel connected. One way people are keeping in touch, we have noticed over the last months is the growing popularity of bingo type games. There seem to be tonnes of these whizzing around the internet right now.
Some businesses have really grabbed this new craze and came up with purchasable cards to play online and face to face bingo and loads of people have come of with their own weird and wonderful bingo games. How is a quick run down of some of the bingo games we have spotted.
Doggy Bingo
An Alzheimer Charity in Scotland has come up with the most heart-warming approach to the beautiful game; using dogs to pick a ball and be a bingo caller. These are very special dogs as they are Dementia Dogs which are trained to help people living with Dememtia.
The online doggy bingo has been made available to people living with Dementia across Scotland and during December 2020 and the beginning of January 2021 has reached far more people than would have been possible face to face. The ingenius craze contines to grow in 2021 with more Dementa Dog handlers being trained up as Bingo ball collectors.
Carla Haizelden, a Dementia Community Dog Handler in Glasgow says:
Doggy Bingo is very straightforward and easy to play. The players can watch Billy go and fetch a ball with a random number on it from a container. He passes it to me and I read out the number.
Although the dogs are all very well trained we do allow them to have their own personality so it’s only natural that they sometimes get distracted and go off.
Boris Bingo
Regardless of your political views, it has to be said, our Prime Minister has some pretty memorable phrases that he loves to reuse and recycle when conducting press conferences and the pandemic briefings.
Some of us love them and some of us simply loathe them. Social Media has truly grabbed these to make the new game Boris Bingo. People are trying to make light of what is a difficult set of circumstances by making a game of crossing out his idiosyncrasies!
TeleParty Bingo
When using the streaming service Netflix, they have a Teleparty option, which allows you to watch any programme within Netflix simultaneously with another person or group of people remotely; so it feels like you are watching the same screen at the same time with no awkward time lag or delay.
You can choose your programme then make a DIY bingo card made up of all the phrases and words and things that might appear in the film. With TeleParty, there is a chat function within the app so you can chat away on screen.
Of course with all the chat in mind, just like you have on an online bingo chat room, the person that dabs off all the phrases is the winner.
You don’t have to just do with with Teleparty on Netflix, but we like how they have added a useful watch together way to accessing their programmes so that nobody ends up two minutes ahead and knows who gets murdered before everyone else!
Personalised Bingo Games Between Friends
One of the ways groups of friends and family have been enjoying themselves is by playing their own bespoke bingo games based on knowledge of each other or what they will say or do.
Many of these games are played over zoom, or similar, or when people can meet up in small groups.
We created a game around one of our friends that gave us hours of fun during a brief period in the summer when we could meet up (see image).
Although no one actually won the game in the end, possibly because we didn’t want it to stop as we were having too much fun.