American, Irish and Australian Bingo Calls

Somebody asks this every December, usually an American cousin watching a British party game in bafflement. Are bingo calls just a British thing? Very nearly, yes!

The full rhyming board, Legs Eleven, Two Fat Ladies and the other eighty-eight, exists in one country, and everywhere else plays the same game without the poetry.

Here’s what callers in America, Ireland and Australia actually say, and what we think they should.

American Bingo Calls

America plays a different bingo. The card is a five-by-five grid with a free square in the middle, the columns wear the letters B, I, N, G and O, and only 75 balls go in the machine. Each column owns its own range, B takes 1 to 15, I takes 16 to 30, and so on up to O’s 61 to 75, so every number leaves the caller’s mouth wearing its letter. B-12. G-55. O-70.

That letter is the reason the American game never grew a rhyming tradition. British calls exist partly because “twenty-two” and “seventy-two” sound alike across a noisy hall, and Two Little Ducks settles the argument. An American caller has no such problem, because the letter does the disambiguating for free. Add winning patterns that change game to game, four corners, the postage stamp, full blackout, and there’s simply less room in the night for a joke about every ball.

Nothing stops a caller freelancing, though, and church-basement bingo is a national institution that could use the material. So here’s our starter canon for the States, written by us because nobody else ever bothered.

If you fancy running an American-style game at home, our free bingo card generator does the US cards too. It offers five-by-five grids with a free square, alongside the British strips.

Irish Bingo Calls

Ireland plays the British game, 90 balls, the nine-column ticket, and bingo nights that hold up parish-hall roofs the way they always have. The calls crossed the Irish Sea with the game itself, so an Irish caller who works the old style reaches for the same board we do. Whether you’ll hear it on any given night depends entirely on the caller, the same as here, and nobody has ever written down what Irish halls do differently, which tells you the answer is probably not much.

Which seems a waste, given the material available. A few we’d offer any parish caller, on the house.

Number one earns its place. Kelly is about as Irish as surnames get, and the very first call on the English board has arguably been waiting a century to go home.

Australian Bingo Calls and Housie

Australia mostly doesn’t call it bingo. The game went out with the armed forces as house, then housy-housy, and settled across Australia and New Zealand as housie, played with the same 90 balls as the British version in RSL clubs and community halls. Some of the British calls travelled with it, and some didn’t, and as with Ireland, no reliable record exists of an Aussie canon, whatever certain websites claim.

A country that gave slang a national costume deserves better than a borrowed board, so, again, ours.

Number 87 is a real place, the surf town on the Victorian coast that borrowed its name from the same Devon seaside as the British call. And 38 stands because an Australian Christmas happens in thirty-degree heat, which makes our Christmas bingo calls even funnier to read from a beach.

The Truth About International Lists

Search for Australian or American bingo calls, and you’ll find pages happily listing them as though reciting folk history. Read closely, and none of them says where a single call came from, because there’s nowhere for them to have come from. The rhyming tradition is documented to the syllable in Britain and nowhere else, and this level of detail doesn’t survive a century of oral tradition without leaving a trace. Somebody in a content office made them up last Tuesday.

We made ours up too. The difference is the label. Treat everything above as a Bingotastic original pressed into service, take it to your own hall, and improve on it, which is how the British board was built in the first place.

For the real thing, all ninety calls and the history behind them, start with our main bingo calls page.