If there is one part of myself that would likely surprise friends and family, it is that I absolutely love bingo. I haven’t given it enough self-reflection to actually tell you why I love it for sure, but it probably has something to do with its repetitive nature, pattern recognition, and bright colours. Saying this makes me sound like a parrot in need of more enrichment, but it is what it is, I guess.
So you can imagine that I jumped at the chance to try out Bingo Betty’s demo, a bingo roguelike. The goal? Much like Balatro, Bingo Betty is a roguelike which has a goal score for each round, which you need to reach before running out of draws. There are seven stages in total, each with four rounds, with the final round being a boss challenge. You only have so many draws per round, though. So you need to make each move count.
Instead of someone calling out the numbers, you can draw three balls at a time, each will have a number, colour, and symbol on it. Pick one and place it on a corresponding number, colour, or symbol until you’ve made a straight line. There are also some special draws, such as the Meat Ball, which can move to adjacent spaces with each draw until it’s part of a line, or a Shuffle Ball, which will randomise all the colours, symbols, and numbers on the board.
It’s pretty intuitive, which is something I always appreciate in games. After the first round, I had a score of 10,884, which was miles over what I needed to pass the round. Then, between each round, you can enter the shop. I was surprised by just how big the shop is when I first saw it. You can purchase blotters, which can duplicate balls or give players an extra roll, refill your draws or upgrade your draws. And if you get a shop with sucky items, then you can reroll it for a chance to buy something better.
The more you play, the easier it is to figure out which items are busted and which just simply aren’t worth your time. But you can also just spend your first few runs purchasing refills and upgrading the number of draws you have—that served me perfectly well.
The most dangerous thing about this game is just how much it sucks you in. Before I knew it, I’d lost 45 minutes to blotting numbers and shifting Meat Balls around the board. Like Balatro and the many games of its sort, you can just keep going with practically no end in sight.
I’m not saying it’s a bad thing; there’s a reason why these kinds of games can take such a hold on players. But I’m just doing my due diligence and warning you, take a break, look out the window, have a glass of water. I know the game yelling “Mega Bingo” can seem very enticing, but at the end of the day, perhaps the real bingo is your mental wellbeing.
But I did not heed my own advice. In the end, my highest score in a single round was 170,646, with the highest line score being 19,512. I don’t want to brag, but I’m pretty good at bingo.
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