How these cards are made

Where the name comes from

Housey-housey is what the game was called in the British Army before anyone called it bingo, and a completed card is still a full house. It is the subject’s own English name and it belongs to nobody, which is more than can be said for most of the words in this niche.

Everything happens in your browser

The cards are dealt and the sheet is drawn by code running in the page you are reading. The PDF is written by the same code, in the same page, from the same geometry that puts it on screen, so the file is the sheet you were looking at, not a re-rendering of it. Words you type into a list are used here and go nowhere else. There is nothing on this site that sends them anywhere.

No two cards in a set are the same

Every card is checked against every card already dealt, and cards are compared by what is on them rather than by where it sits: two cards holding the same 24 words in a different arrangement fill up on exactly the same 24 calls, so they count as one card and another is drawn.

When a list is too short to make that many different cards, the press says so and stops. That is the difference between this and a generator that quietly hands over repeats, a stack with two identical cards in it is a game with two winners on one call, and nobody finds out until it happens in front of everybody.

The shuffle number

Every set is dealt from a number you can see and change. The same number always deals the same cards, so the sheet on screen is the file you get, and a set can be reprinted months later exactly as it was.

What this press will not print

Nothing here names a team, a competition, a broadcast or a character, and that is not squeamishness. The championship game most people want a football card for is a registered trademark, and so are the awards, the leagues and the films. A card naming one of them cannot be given away, and a list of what actually happens on the field works for any game, in any season, for anybody watching.

Nothing here is set up for playing for money either. These are cards for a hall, a classroom or a kitchen table.

Everything prints in black

A set of bingo cards is going to be photocopied thirty times on a machine in a hall, and anything that depends on colour does not survive the first copy. The rules are black, the numbers are black, the blanks on a ninety-ball ticket are a grey tint that copies as a grey tint, and a card that has been through twice still works.