Electronic & Touch Screen Bingo

Electronic bingo usually means bingo you can play on a table, instead of a paper book at a bingo hall. Mecca calls it Mecca Max, Club 3000 calls it a Bingo Bee, and Buzz just calls it a touchscreen or touchpad.

The same words also cover the home bingo machines you’ll find in toy shops, so we’ve covered those too. Below is how hall tablets work, what they cost compared with paper, how linked games join clubs together, and the rules behind it all.

Let’s get started!

What Each Club Calls Its Tablet

Every chain has its own name for the same idea: a handheld screen that holds your tickets and marks off the numbers as they’re called.

The names change, but the job doesn’t. You still play the same 90-ball games as the paper players around you, called by the same caller, for the same prizes.

Step-by-Step Guide

At Mecca and Buzz, the routine is close to identical. You go to the bingo sales desk, a member of staff sets you up and adds your credit, and you take the tablet to your seat. Each game loads automatically when it’s due, so there’s no flicking between books.

Numbers can be marked two ways. You can tap each one yourself, or switch on auto-dab (Buzz calls it AUTOPLAY) and let the tablet do it. Buzz puts it simply: with it on, “It’s impossible to miss a number”. On Buzz touchscreens you can also buy more tickets from the screen and order food to your table.

The one job the tablet won’t do for you is claim. Both chains still want you to shout “House!” and press CLAIM, and Mecca’s terms say the claim has to be in before the next number is called. Leave it late, and the win can go. At Buzz, leaving a tablet unattended or handing it to someone else voids any win on it.

Tablets make for a much more laid-back session. You can tap along if you like the feel of it, or turn on auto-dab and let it do the work. It’s a completely different experience, closer to playing online bingo than sitting eyes down over a paper book. On a Buzz touchscreen, it’s all in one place too. You can order food to your seat and flick over to a selection of slots between games without getting up.

Tickets and Prices Vs Paper

The tablet’s real advantage is how many tickets it can hold. Mecca’s Aberdeen club, for example, sells a main session electronic pack from 12 tickets for £8 up to 120 tickets for £59, while paper is 6 tickets for £8. The electronic pack also includes extra games such as the American Flyer and the Lucky Stars Jackpots.

Buzz lets you play up to 156 tickets on a touchscreen, plus 6 paper ones alongside if you want both. Its £10 welcome deal comes with either one paper book or 30 touchscreen tickets, and Buzz points out you’re “5 times more likely to win” on 30 tickets than on six. That’s true for each game, but more tickets also means more spent across a session, so set your budget first.

Note, the above prices are illustrative only and subject to change. Check your local club to see what’s on.

A few things to keep in mind:

• Buzz may ask for a refundable deposit
• Mecca’s Max has optional side games, such as Lucky Lines, at extra cost.
• You can withdraw up to £1,000 a day from a Mecca Max account, and after 12 months of no use, a £10 yearly admin charge may apply.

Linked Games and the National Bingo Game

Some games aren’t just for the room you’re sitting in. Mecca’s linked games are called from one “control club” and played across several Mecca clubs at once. The stakes are shared in line with the tickets each club sold, and if the link drops, every club plays its own local game instead. Claims in the other clubs are passed through by the duty manager.

Buzz goes a step further with Big Money Live. Launched in October 2024 and hosted twice a day from a studio in Derby, it links prize money between players in Buzz clubs and players on Buzz’s website, and you can join on a touchscreen or on paper.

Then there’s the National Bingo Game, which isn’t tied to any one chain. It’s been run since 1986, played twice a day, and at the time of our research it cost £2.50 for five tickets. Since February 2026, it has carried a £250,000 jackpot for a full house in 14 numbers or fewer, and the first winner was a player at Club 3000 Wigan. Paper and tablet players take part on equal terms in all of these.

Electronic Bingo in Slots Venues

Electronic bingo doesn’t only happen in big halls. Merkur Slots runs bingo on tablets, or printed tickets, in 166 of its high street venues, and a Merkur licence application in Doncaster described games joined across several venues, with prizes capped at £500. It’s a quick game, not a two-hour session with a caller. Our Merkur Slots near me page lists which of them run it, and how bingo ended up inside slots shops in the first place.

The Rules Behind the Tablets

Bingo tablets are tightly regulated, which answers the “is electronic bingo rigged?” question better than any reassurance we could give. The Gambling Commission’s technical standards require every called number to reach every player’s device at the same time, so nobody on a tablet gets a head start over the room. Portable devices have to warn you when the battery is running low, and you must be told if the wireless connection fails.

A tablet can only run one gambling activity at a time, so you can’t play slots in the middle of a bingo game. Once a tablet runs slots, the Commission treats it as a gaming machine, bringing it under the same 20% limit on higher-stake machines as the cabinets in the slots room.

The rules could change. The government’s October 2025 consultation on bingo premises proposed a dedicated bingo area in every venue, and said any tablet gaming machine in that area must offer bingo. Its preferred option was to keep today’s mix of games on tablets, warning that banning machine play on them “could impose significant operational burdens”. The government has not yet published its response.

Who Makes the Tablets

A handful of suppliers sit behind most of the screens. Playtech’s ECM Systems agreed in February 2025 to supply 10,000 touchscreen tablets to Buzz, prepared at its workshop in Hull, and the same company supplied the electronic bingo software for Mecca’s Edinburgh club, way back in 2006. By 2015, Mecca had 12,000 handheld terminals in its clubs. NRM, which supplied the platform for more than 130 independent clubs in the National Bingo Game Association in 2019, makes the Budd.e tablet, now sold by Boomerang Digital. It handles main-stage bingo, ticket buying and food and drink orders from the seat.

The Good and the Not So Good

What tablets do well

• You can’t miss a number with auto-dab on.
• You can play far more tickets than you could follow on paper.
• Staff will set you up and show you how it works, and Mecca suggests it as a good place to start if you’re new.
• At Buzz you can order food and top up without leaving your seat.

What to watch

• You still have to claim yourself before the next number is called.
• If a tablet fails mid-game, you get your stake back for the tickets you couldn’t play, not the prize you might have won.
• Deposits, hire charges and Mecca’s dormant-account fee all add up if you don’t keep an eye on them.
• It’s easy to drift into slots on the same screen between games.

Electronic Bingo Machines for Home

If you searched “electronic bingo” looking for something to play in the living room, you’re after a home bingo machine. The best-known in the UK is John Adams’ Deluxe Electronic Bingo, which calls random numbers on an illuminated display, checks winning cards for you and comes with 100 cards and seven game variations. It cost £24.99 when we checked.

Hosting a game at home can cost nothing, though. Our free bingo caller calls all 90 numbers with the traditional calls, and the bingo card generator prints as many cards as you need. Our guide to hosting a bingo night covers the rest.

Electronic Bingo Questions