Printable bingo cards

The set on this page

The board above is set to Christmas bingo cards, 5 by 5, 8 cards, 2 to a sheet. Each card is five squares by five with the middle one free, so there are 24 squares to fill. The card comes out 186 by 128.3 mm on A4, and a square is 37.2 by 23.85 mm, which sets the words at 15.33 pt. Eight cards at two to a sheet is 4 sheets, and the file has 5 pages: the last one is the caller’s sheet.

Why the list has to be longer than the card

This is the arithmetic the whole game rests on, and it is worth a paragraph because almost nothing else says it. A five-by-five card with a free middle square has 24 squares. Hand it a list of exactly 24 words and every card carries the same 24 words, in a different order, so the moment the last word is called, every player in the room fills their last square at once. There is no winner. The press refuses that outright rather than printing it.

The Christmas list here has 36 words. Choosing 24 of 36 can be done 1,251,677,700 ways, so there are more genuinely different cards in it than anyone will ever print. That figure is what the press checks against: ask for more cards than the list can make different sets for, and it says so and stops.

What the caller gets

The last page of the file is the caller’s sheet: all 36 words in a grid, to cross off as they are called. A word on nobody’s card is still a word that can be called, so the caller’s sheet is drawn from the whole list rather than from what happened to be dealt. Without it you have a stack of cards and no game.

The shuffle is a number you can write down

Every set is drawn from a shuffle number shown in the controls. The same number always draws the same cards, which means two things worth having: the cards you are looking at are exactly the cards in the file, and if you lose card 14 next week you can come back, type the same number, and print card 14 again.

Everything prints in black

A bingo card is going to be photocopied on a hall photocopier that has been there since the nineties. Nothing here depends on colour: the squares are ruled in black, the free square says FREE, and a card that has been through a mono copier twice still works. The same set is offered as PDF, PNG and SVG.