Printable Bingo Cards

Most people know how to play the game of bingo, after all it's a game that many of us either played as kids or learned to enjoy in later life. The idea of the game is quite simple: every player is given a bingo card (sometimes known as a "bingo board" or "bingo sheet"), each of the squares contains an item (traditionally a number), and players tick off squares when the corresponding items are called out by the bingo caller. The objective of the game is to be the first player to get a continuous line of items diagonally, vertically or horizontally across the card, and then claim the win by calling out "Bingo!".

As already mentioned, in traditional versions of bingo, the items in the squares of the bingo card are numbers. Today however many variations of the standard game have also become popular, and in these variants, words, phrases, dates, times or even math problems can be used for hte items on the cards.

- Holiday versions of bingo are increasingly popular. Bingo is a great activity for family and community events since people of all ages can play together. In holiday variants of the game, words or phrases relating to the particular holiday are used, so words like "Advent" or "Santa Claus" in a Christmas game, or "Revolution" or "George Washington" in an Independence Day game.

- Bingo games with words and phrases are popular in K-12, English as Second Language (ESL) and foreign language teaching. They're a fun way for students to practice word recognition, reading and spelling.

- Bingo cards can also be printed with math problems. They're good way to practice multiplication tables ("times tables") as well as arithmetic. Students are required to write in the correct answers to problems as they are called out, rather than simply ticking items off their cards.

In order to play most of these variants of the game, you will of course need bingo cards containing items relating to your chosen theme. Obtaining preprinted cards can be difficult - even if you can find somewhere to buy them, they can be expensive and may not contain the exact items that you want. Preparing bingo cards by hand is possible, but very time consuming! The best answer is to get your computer to do the work - with the right bingo card maker software you can print custom bingo cards with consummate ease.