Bingo has come a long way since it was first played as a lottery back in the 1500s in Italy. Today, you can play bingo at any time of day or night, thanks to the fact that there are so many online bingo sites. And although it’s always been a cheap game to play, today you can even play for free thanks to the fact that many sites offer no deposit bonus money to new players. This means that you get given credit to play with when you register on a site, even if you don’t want to put any of your own cash into your account. You can find about bingo sites with no deposit here.
Many of today’s younger online bingo players won’t be aware of the long history that the game has. The first version of bingo that we have any record of is ‘Lo gioco del lotto del Italia’ - a lottery style game played in Italy in the 1500s. It proved to be so popular that it was soon being played in other European countries. The game board bore quite a resemblance to the bingo cards we see today. It had nine columns and three rows, with four empty spaces per row. Wooden counters were used by players to cover up the numbers that were called out and the first to cover a full row was the winner.
A version of the game was seen by Edwin S Lowe at a county fair in Georgia, USA, in the early 1900s. The game Beano was played by people covering up the numbers on their game cards with a dried bean, and when their card was completely covered by beans, the winning player would shout out ‘Beano’. According to legend, one lady got so excited by her win that she yelled ‘Bingo’ instead, and from this, Edwin Lowe took the new name and developed his own version of the game.
Lowe employed a mathematician called Carl Leffler to devise new combinations of bingo playing cards and Leffler increased the number of combinations to 6,000 by 1930. Lowe’s Bingo caught on in a big way, thanks to its popularity as a church fundraiser. Only a few years later, more than 10,000 games were played every week in the USA.
Bingo didn’t reach British shores until the mid-1900s but by the 1980s the nation was gripped with the National Bingo Game where one game took place simultaneously all over the country, with an amazing jackpot to play for. And although you can still play bingo https://bingo77uk.com/ in bingo halls in different towns and cities today, the development of online bingo has taken the reach of the game to another level entirely.
Millions of people sit down to play bingo today at home, at work, even somewhere in between. Some people have regular times that they play bingo online, so that they can catch up with bingo friends in the chat rooms, others go on at random times whenever they feel like getting the buzz you get from watching the numbers being filled in on your card.
And for those people who weren’t comfortable with the idea of playing online games for money, the development of free bingo games has been provided as a solution. Now you can have all the fun of bingo without putting any money into it at all. It’s yet another step in the evolution of bingo!