I've been seeing the commercials for "National Bingo Night" for awhile. This is the one with the Indian man in the referee's outfit yelling "No bingo!" The latest crop of game shows (1 vs 100, Identity, etc…) have failed to really catch fire, so I've been hoping for one that would be fun to actually get behind and enjoy. The question, of course, was going to be "How do you play competitive Bingo? Isn't it just random numbers?"

Well, here's how you play it. You get a contestant (more on that in a minute) and have him play a random number game. One of the games was "Guess red or black", one was "Try to get numbers with 5's in them", and one was "Try to eliminate the digits 1-9". In each case all the contestant does is press the button to serve up a bingo ball.

The catch is that the audience is, in fact, the ones playing Bingo. So the idea is that the contestant has to win their game before anybody gets bingo. Interesting, actually. The longer the game goes on, the better the chance of someone getting bingo. As people get "one away" from Bingo, they stand up, so the contestant feels that much more pressure.

What's fun is that you can play at home, and not online like a bunch of other lame games. Here you actually print out bingo cards, each of which has its own unique identifier. So if you win you can punch the number back in and claim a prize. Sure the prizes are lame (like movie tickets or a $5 KMart coupon), but hey, it's a reason to get into it. You can print a bunch of cards and everybody can play.

Now, back to the contestants. Like all television game shows, the contestants are just crazy annoying. Where do they get these people that have no problem making complete fools of themselves, jumping up and down and screaming crazy things? It's the most annoying part of the show. Basically I tivo'd the whole thing and fast forwarded through the contestant parts to get to the actual number drawing.

I didn't win anything. Oh well, there's always next week.