Bingo card

The game operated very much like a modern lottery as players placed bets on the chances of certain numbers being drawn.

By the 1700s, a version of Lo Gioco del Lotto d'Italia was played in France, where paper cards were first used to keep track of numbers drawn by a caller.

[2] Cards were reusable, meaning players used tokens to mark called numbers.

Manual random permutation is an onerous and time-consuming task that limited the number of Bingo cards available for play for centuries.

The product of the five rows (360,3604 * 32,760) describes the total number of unique playing cards.

Printing a complete set of Bingo cards is impossible for all practical purposes.

For example, in a simple one-pattern game of Bingo a winning card may be the first person to complete row #3.

Because the "N" column contains a free space, the maximum number of cards that guarantee a unique winner is (15*15*15*15) = 50,625.

Perhaps the most common pattern set, known as "Straight-line Bingo" is completing any of the five rows, columns, or either of the main diagonals.

(Still impossibly enormous, but our eager printer described above would only need 1.29 days to complete the task.)

The single-pattern #3 row has already been mentioned, but its limited card set causes problems for the emerging online Bingo culture.

(A unique winner is further desirable for online play where network delays and other communication interference can unfairly affect multiple winning cards.