An Introduction to Bingo Patterns
One of the first questions you would ask as a newcomer to the world of bingo would possibly be, ‘What are bingo patterns?’ Basically, bingo patterns are the patterns that you see in the bingo cards, the patterns you get when you circle each correct entry on your card or mark it on your screen in the case of online bingo.
Bingo patterns can literally be limitless, because it is up to the designer who designs the cards to zero in on a particular pattern for a particular card/set of cards. However, there are set patterns that exist for bingo cards currently. You can divide most of these existing bingo patterns into three categories. In the next section, we will read about these bingo patterns.
Categories of Bingo Patterns
You can divide the existing patterns in bingo into three basic categories:
- Standard bingo patterns – These are also called static bingo patterns. You cannot push these patterns around on the card. Also, in the case of static bingo patterns, the winner would need to have all the squares of the pattern marked correctly, without skipping any of them.
- Crazy bingo patterns – Crazy bingo patterns are very different from the static patterns in bingo. Here, you can turn the patterns in 90 degree units to complete a win. What this means is you can rotate this kind of pattern by 90, 180 or 270 degrees during a game.
- Wild bingo patterns – Wild patterns in bingo form the third category of patterns. Bingo cards with scattered patterns are said to have wild patterns. What this effectively means is that the bingo patterns do not shift in this case unlike in the crazy bingo patterns; they are static. However, they need not be located in one single place on a card; they could be located any place.
More about Bingo Patterns
You can name bingo patterns based on how they look on a card. Using this approach, you can literally have a limitless number of patterns in bingo, as it is for you to define, as a card designer, what kind of pattern you want.
You can have bingo patterns named after the way they look. For instance you could have patterns based on their resemblance to the different alphabets in the English language. You could have bingo patterns resembling O, U, C, Y, T, X, I, and so on.
Another way of naming bingo patterns could be on the basis of their resemblance to objects or items you see in daily life. So you could have bingo patterns that resembled a straight line – both horizontal and vertical as well as a diagonal line; a postage stamp, where the bingo pattern could be located in any of the corners of the card, a double/triple stamp where the bingo pattern could be spread across two of the corners of the card, and so on.
These are not the only bingo patterns you see; just a few of the commonly seen ones. There are a huge numbers of patterns available; the best thing to do would be to visit an online casino or bingo room and check them out yourself.