Learning how to play 80 ball bingo is really simple, basically it is a fusion of the 90 and 75 ball games. Some people refer to the game as shutter-board bingo, because it was played with these board which has little windows and shutter you close over them as the numbers were called. We don’t see it called this today, and particularly online it is called 80 ball bingo.
For a middle of the road choice of bingo game, this version is ideal. It is a little shorter than the 90 ball variety and a little longer than the 75 ball game. It also offers a different way of winning, patterns are used on the card, just like in 75 ball bingo. The only really big difference is in the actual design of the card. It is also a grid, with five rows and four columns. Each column is a different colour and the colours used are red, yellow, blue and silver.
There are no tricks to playing 80 ball bingo, just like playing any other game of bingo you buy your tickets, the numbers are call from a selection of 1 – 80 and its eyes down while you play. The only difference is that playing online, you don’t have to go “eyes-down” when the game begins, you just allow the game to play through. Most sites use an auto-daub feature, there are some sites which allow you to turn this off, so you can mark the cards yourself, but I haven’t seen this very widely used.
The beauty of the auto-daub system is that you are able to play side games, chat to your roomies, and participate in chat games, while the bingo game is playing. Of course you don’t have to do this all at the same time, but many players have become so adept at multi-tasking when they play online bingo, they do all three.
There are no huge rule books you have to read to play 80 ball bingo, just join a site, choose your game and play. It is made more interesting by the fact that patterns are able to be printed onto the cards, because it is an almost square grid. The patterns used, may be specific to a promotion or just the classic X, four corners, other letters, horizontal and vertical. The winner is the first person to complete covering all the numbers in the pattern.
