Bingo Drive: putting color into your grandmother’s favorite pastime

Forget what you know about your grandma’s recreational bingo games, Bingo Drive is bringing it back in a newer, more colorful way. It might not have the hype that Pokemon GO had on its launch or the popularity of Candy Crush, but Bingo Drive’s colorful animations, corny tunes, and scenes from all over the world gives life to what many of us might have thought of as grandma’s good old social pastime.

With over 1.5 million users worldwide, Bingo Drive has found its niche for those who enjoy those little bits of euphoria when they can get up and shout “Bingo!” The app is community-driven, emulating a “crowd sourced” environment, where players have to try to get bingo on one or two cards before all the bingo winning opportunities run out. Power-ups are also available to help players get closer to completing the bingo row.

Players compete across several famous landscapes to collect points and unlock puzzle pieces. When completing the puzzle, players can earn more rewards, points, and accolades for their success. The gameplay itself depends mostly on the luck of the draw ﹣ with a hint of strategy that kicks in when players come closest to getting bingo and might need to use power-ups to seal the deal. 

The game is designed and developed by Glidingdeer, an Israeli-based tech company that provides mobile game developers with the ability to enhance their product’s user experience.  

Similarly to popular language-learning app Duolingo, Bingo Drive has leaderboards that add to both the competitive and community-driven nature of the game. Players can reap prizes and reach the top of the leaderboards by beating opponents. So, unlike other traditional mobile bingo games, it uses a greater pool size to create a social environment that gamers look for in this day and age of the social media craze. 

What stands out the most for users like me is the hand-drawn animations of animals that pop out with vibrant colors. Each character is crafted by the design team, diverging from traditionally computer-only generated images. This combination, with the different unlockable rewards and trophies, acts like a sort of dopamine to the player, which is how this could become more addictive than competitor games.

While it does offer a more visually stimulating experience to bingo players, it’s difficult to see the long term success of bingo in the mobile gaming community. Bingo games, in general, do not have lasting impressions or popularity like other more complex app store options do, but for what it’s worth, Bingo Drive is able to maximize the potential the game has. In the meantime, players will plug away and keep anxiously anticipating the completion of that winning row, while the folk electric guitar plays in the background and the animated features keep the eyes on the prize.

Bingo Drive is available on the two main mobile operating systems － iOS and Android － popular social media goliath Facebook and ecommerce giant Amazon, for computer download.