While there’s little or no paperwork to prove it, Bingo, in its earliest form, might have come from ancient Roman soldiers whiling away their time while on garrison duty away from their homes. The game of Keno, a variant of Bingo, and a game I played when last in Las vegas, is supposed to have originated from Japanese Emperors and Shoguns. Again, little hard evidence of this!
We then return to Rome again, because Bingo’s history really seems to have started in 1530 in Italy, with a Govt sponsored lotto game, called “Lo Guico del Lotto”. If you are in Italy on a Saturday, you’ll see folks still playing the game, just about 500 years on!
Le Lotto was a sort of the game like what we all know and love today, and began in France in the latter 1700s. There’s no proof to indicate that the French Royalty and aristocrats attempted to make use of the game to subvert the masses from their revolution, but it seems the game used playing cards, tokens and the card suits and numbers called aloud. Unlike revolution, the game spread quickly across Europe. There are examples of it being employed in Germany, apparently as a teaching help. In reality this happens even today in many nursery and junior colleges. I even came across a change employed in an IT Company, built to try reducing the amount of user-unfriendly technical expressions utilised by its staff when pitching for contracts. There, if all your techy words were crossed off, you got a dressing down from the CE!
The European version of Lotto had a player’s card split into nine vertical rows and three horizontal ones forming squares. The vertical rows were split into 10′s.. First row containing 4 numbers between 1-10, the second 11-20, up to the final row, 81-90. There were five blank squares, and one “completed” square. The object was to be the first to complete one of the horizontal rows, from numbers drawn randomly. Seem familiar?
Much like our Roman soldiers of yore, the game was taken overseas by the Army- this time the UK Armed forces forging its empire overseas. Not surprisingly the British Commonwealth git the Bingo bug, which was favored in Australia at the turn of the 20 th century. It was known as Housey Housey, and upon completing the complete card one would yell “House!” ( as in full house ).
Most researchers agree that the first recorded game was in 1929 at a carnival near Atlanta. The game was called “Beano” because even though it had cards that would look familiar to us Bingo players today, dried beans were used to mark off the numbers called. A Toy Sales rep from New York called Edwin Lowe noted the game at a carnival and immediately saw the potential for commercial success. It is said that.

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