Playing Card Themed Bingo Games

In a playing card themed bingo game, all the players have hands or arrays of playing cards instead of bingo tickets, and the caller deals from a deck of cards instead of drawing bingo balls. You win by matching all the cards in a hand or array with the cards that have been dealt (which is equivalent to daubing all the numbers in a regular bingo game).

This may sound like an odd idea, but it’s one that has been tried many times at UK bingo sites by several different bingo software suppliers over the last few years.

The best known of these playing card bingo games is undoubtedly Cinco by Tombola. Cinco has been around for more than 10 years and remains extremely popular. Cinco is Spanish for 5 and the aim of the game is to match a hand of 5 cards with the cards dealt; when a card is matched, a poker chip is placed on top of it which is a nice touch.

Players can buy into Cinco at 5p, 10p, 20p and 40p stake levels and there’s a maximum of 5 hands per player and 75 players per room.

The 52-5 game mechanic of Cinco has been used by several other bingo software suppliers but with much less success.

Gamesys used to have a similar game called Super Snap. It played very like Cinco but in a nice twist, you could win an extra prize by being dealt a scoring poker hand. It was expensive to play (for a bingo game) even with a low hand limit of 5 as the hands cost £1 each. Super Snap was an Adobe Flash game and when Flash was phased out, it wasn’t replaced with a more modern version.

Dragonfish first introduced a 52-5 bingo game in 2016 and it has been around ever since in a variety of guises. There was one (Bingo Roulette) that was dressed up to look like a roulette wheel. And there was one (Candylicious) where all the cards were replaced by different sweets that were spewed at great speed out of a candy machine. Unsurprisingly, only the version with actual playing cards is still live and although there are more than 100 Dragonfish bingo sites running the Bingo Deal room (as it is now called) it rarely has more than a handful of players meaning that the prizes are unappealing. The lack of any prebuy facilities probably has something to do with that. Another problem with the Dragonfish game is that although the hands are reasonably priced at 5p, players can buy up to 96 hands per game and the ticket purchase screen defaults to 24 hands, so it can get expensive (for a bingo game).

Playtech have had two attempts at doing 52-5 bingo, one called Royal 5s which was exclusive to Mecca Bingo back in 2016 and one called Housey Bingo across the Virtue Fusion bingo network in 2020. Housey Bingo was very similar to Cinco, with hand prices from 5p to 40p and a maximum of 5 hands per player, but it never attracted a critical mass of players and was quietly retired in 2022.

Only Tombola, then, have really been able to make a success out of 52-5 bingo, and part of the problem may be to do with the game itself. 52-5 bingo games are over quite quickly and there’s only one winner. A game of 90 ball bingo (the most popular type in the UK) takes much longer to play as there are 90 balls and 15 numbers per card to mark off, and there’s also more than one prize to play for (one line, two lines and full house). Essentially, the 90 ball game has much more entertainment value for players.

But what about playing card bingo games that don’t use the 52-5 mechanic? Well, there have been two such games.

The first was Joker Jackpot (nothing to do with the Big Time Gaming slot game of the same name), which was available at Virtue Fusion bingo sites back in the day when the bingo lobby still ran on Flash (and was therefore a desktop only game). Rather than hands of 5 cards, it had arrays of 9 cards (arranged 3×3) and the dealer’s deck included 2 jokers (functioning as normal cards not wilds). Players could buy up to 6 arrays per game (which would give them one of every card in the deck). It was called Joker Jackpot because there was a progressive jackpot for completing an array in 14 calls with a joker as the final card. Joker Jackpot had two prizes per game, one for completing the J pattern and one for full house. It’s very hard to see how multiple arrays of 9 cards could be displayed on a mobile phone screen and this explains why it wasn’t updated after the demise of Flash.

The other game, Nevada, is more recent. It was introduced at Tombola in June 2021 and also uses an array of cards rather than a poker style hand. In fact the array is even bigger than the one in Joker Jackpot – 16 cards arranged 4×4. So how have they managed to get it to work on a mobile phone screen?

The answer is simple – Nevada is a single ticket multi-stake bingo game.

Single ticket means that each player has just one array of cards. As well as making a bingo game easier to follow on a mobile phone screen, single ticket makes it fairer for players as everyone has an equal chance of winning.

Multi-stake means that players can choose the level at which they want to buy into the game. In a multi-stake game, prizes are always a multiple of stake so the higher the level at which you buy in, the bigger the prize you can win.

Nevada has 5 stake levels ranging from 10p to £2.

As Tombola already had a very popular playing card bingo game in Cinco, they needed to make Nevada quite different and they have certainly succeeded in doing so – whereas Cinco with its 5 card hands has a flavour of poker about it, the Nevada array looks more like Solitaire. (It’s certainly not solitary though as there’s a very lively chat room attached!).

At launch, Nevada had three prizes per game (one line, two lines, and full house). Players liked this so much that the game was subsequently tweaked to add an extra prize for three lines. For playability on any device and sheer entertainment value, Nevada far surpasses all the other playing card bingo games and its continued success is no surprise.

*Photos from Pixabay

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