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While there’s not much or no documentation to prove it, Bingo, in its earliest form, might have come from ancient Roman soldiers whiling away their time whilst on garrison duty away from their homes. The game of Keno, an alternative of Bingo, and a game I played when last in Vegas, is supposed to have originated from Japanese Emperors and Shoguns. Again, small hard evidence of this!
We then return to Rome again, because Bingo’s history truly seems to have started in 1530 in Italy, with a Govt. sponsored lottery game, called “Lo Guico del Lotto”. If you are in Italy on a Sat., you’ll see people still playing the game, nearly 5 hundred years on!
Le Lotto was a form of the game like what we know and love today, and started in France in the late 1700s. There is not any evidence to indicate that the French Royalty and noblemen tried to use the game to subvert the masses from their revolution, however it appears 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 used in Germany, allegedly as a teaching aid. In fact this occurs even today in several nursery and junior faculties. I even discovered an adaptation used in an IT Company, engineered to try reducing the quantity of user-unfriendly technical expressions employed by its staff when pitching for contracts. There, if all your techy words were crossed off, you were given a dressing down from the CE!
The EU version of Lotto had a player’s card divided into 9 vertical rows and 3 horizontal ones forming squares. The vertical rows were split up into 10′s.. First row containing four numbers between 1-10, the second 11-20, up to the final row, 81-90. There were 5 blank squares, and one “completed” square. The object was to be first to complete one of the horizontal rows, from numbers drawn at random . Seem all too familiar?
Very like our Roman infantrymen of yore, the game was taken overseas by the Army- this time the UK Military forging its empire overseas. As you might think the UK Commonwealth git the Bingo bug, and that was popular in Australia at the turn of the twentieth century. It was known as Housey Housey, and on finishing the entire card one would scream “House!” ( as in full house ).
Most analysts agree the first recorded game was in 1929 at a carnival near Atlanta. The game was called “Beano” because while 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 NY called Edwin Lowe noted the game at a carnival and immediately saw the capability for commercial success. It is claimed that.

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