There Was a Farmer

I have an odd obsession with bingo.  Not the farmer's dog, actually, the game.  I can't really put my finger on why I have affection for a game that is, at it's heart, just random number generation.  No skill will help you be "good" at bingo.  All you have to do is listen for the caller to say a randomly generated number and then look at your field of randomly generated numbers to see if there's a match.  Then mark that number with your brightly colored, wipe-away marker.  Not exactly chess.

But I just love the heck out of it.  It is probably because one of my earliest memories is going to play bingo with my grandparents when I was young.  That's bingo's target audience by the way.  Old people and children with single digit ages.  There are outliers of course.  My niece and her husband have a weekly bingo night and GOD HELP YOU if you interrupt it.  Anyway.  When I was a single digit aged child I would go to a building my grandmother just called "gerontology" and play with her while my grandfather called the games.  I remember thinking that the crazy, popcorn machine thing that they used to get the balls with the numbers was super-duper-cool.  I always wanted to play with it.  My grandfather, knowing me, never let that happen, thereby saving them the trouble and cost of buying a new-fangled replacement machine.

Now that I'm middle aged I use the internet to satiate my bingo cravings.  Most often I play using apps I've downloaded.  Yes, apps in the plural sense.  I have 5, I think.  I'm sure that if I wanted to my niece and nephew would welcome me to their bingo club with open arms but I'm not sure I'm ready for that level of savage.  Five different bingo apps is excessive you say?  HOGWASH, I say.  I like them all for different reasons.  Each has it's own design and layout as well as different side...things to entertain you while you aren't listening for your random numbers.  One lets you run a city and fill orders from various shops to earn boosts and other rewards.  One has a crafting station and a global tournament.  A couple others have versions of classic (read: not fun) board games that you can fart around with between games.  Each has it's own appeal and having multiple versions lets me cycle through them when I run out of game tickets on one of the others.

Now you know some of my horrible secrets.  I'm a middle aged nerd, my mental age ranges between 9 and 90 years old, and my grandfather abused me as a child by not letting me break his shit.  It's a wonder I didn't grow up to be a serial bingo machine smasher.