Bingo Card Generator (75-Ball, 90-Ball, Words)

About the Bingo Card Generator (75-Ball, 90-Ball, Words)

Make as many different bingo cards as you need and download them as a print-ready PDF — 1, 2 or 4 cards per page on A4 or US Letter. Three games are built in: classic 75-ball bingo (a 5 × 5 card under B-I-N-G-O with a free centre), UK 90-ball tickets in strips of six, and word bingo from your own list for classrooms, baby showers, team meetings or holiday parties (3 × 3, 4 × 4 or 5 × 5).

Then run the game from the same page: the caller draws numbers or words fairly and shows them on a board (it can read them aloud with an on-device voice), and Check a card shows any card with the called squares marked and tells you whether it has a line, four corners or a full card — and on which call.

Common uses

• Teachers: vocabulary, languages, history terms and maths facts (put the answers on the cards; when the caller draws an answer, read out its question).
• Party and event games: baby and bridal showers, birthdays, Christmas, Diwali and office events.
• Community halls and fundraisers that play classic 75-ball or 90-ball bingo.
• Meetings and conferences — “buzzword bingo” with the phrases people always say.

The three games

• 75-ball (the usual game in North America): five columns under the letters B-I-N-G-O. Column B holds five numbers from 1–15, I from 16–30, N from 31–45, G from 46–60 and O from 61–75, so a call such as “G 52” tells players which column to look in. The centre square is normally free. A line is any complete row, column or diagonal.
• 90-ball (the usual game in the UK): tickets of 3 rows × 9 columns with 15 numbers, 5 in each row, printed in strips of six that use every number from 1 to 90 once. Prizes are usually one line, two lines and a full house. India’s Tambola uses the same ticket — the Tambola ticket generator checks Early Five and Four Corners too.
• Word bingo: your own words, phrases or numbers on 3 × 3, 4 × 4 or 5 × 5 cards; odd sizes can have a free centre. Each card gets a random selection of the list in random squares.

Every card is different

Cards are checked against each other as they are made, and a repeat is redrawn, so no two cards in a set have the same squares. For 75-ball there are 552,446,474,061,128,648,601,600,000 possible cards (360,360⁴ × 32,760, counting the order within each column), so in practice two would never match anyway. For word bingo with only as many words as squares, every card has the same words in a different order — fine for a game, but with more words than squares the cards fill up at different speeds and the game lasts longer.

Game codes and checking a card

Each set of cards belongs to a game code such as K7Q2-9XMA, printed on every card with the card number. The code is drawn with your browser’s secure random generator, and every card is worked out from it with SHA-256, so the same code always gives the same cards. That is how Check a card can show card 7 of your game on any device without storing anything. Word cards also print a short List code: checking a word card needs the same word list, in the same order, that the cards were made from.

Limitations

• Up to 100 cards (or 90-ball tickets) at a time, and up to 300 words of 40 characters or fewer.
• The PDF can print Latin, Greek and Cyrillic letters. For words in other scripts (for example Hindi or Arabic), use Print and “Save as PDF”, which uses your device’s fonts.
• Pictures are not supported on cards — use words.
• The caller runs on one device and does not sync to others; to check a card elsewhere, type the calls there.
• For games and fundraisers, not for gambling or draws that need a certified random source.

Privacy

Your words, cards and calls stay in your browser; the cards are made on your device from the game code and nothing is uploaded.