Super Custom Bingo

In 2020, in order to get my kids excited about the Super Bowl, I made some custom bingo cards. I did this very manually at first, just by randomly placing spaces in tables in a Word doc. There were football specific spaces and commercial spaces. I'd spent time searching the internet to get an idea of what brands would be advertising at The Big Game to make sure I had some brands that would actually get marked on the cards. The football spaces were pretty standard things that happen in most games, like a wide receiver scoring a touchdown or a flag being thrown for holding. I had some other spaces on there that may not happen at all, for example, every card had either a "Coin Flip Heads" or a "Coin Flip Tails" space, but not both. There were also some spaces that were more common, like a flag for pass interference, and spaces that were less common, like an onside kick or a safety. 

I had considered using an online bingo card generator. There were several websites that existed, and they were mostly free or cheap, and I could load in all the spaces and get cards generated. But these sites weren't customizable like I needed. I often couldn't put images on the cards like the Super Bowl Logo or the brand logos for the ads. I couldn't specify rules to force the cards to adhere to my coin flip logic or to force cards to have a healthy mix of football plays and commercials. There was nothing from stopping a space for a Safety to show up as often as a space for a First Down. This wasn't going to meet my needs, and I wanted the bingo cards to be fun and I wanted to ensure there would at least be one bingo before the game was over. Playing Bingo for 3 hours without a winner is boring, and I had young kids that I wanted to be interested in the game!

Let me tell you, that first year was awesome! The kids had a blast. I'd never seen a 10 year old so excited to see a Budweiser commercial. They were asking me questions after every play to see if they could mark off their football spaces. They cared about the game, the outcome, the penalties, the ads, and we had a blast. My daughter won the very first game, and I think she still holds that as a point of pride.

The next year, we made it a party and invited some friends over. We bought a few $5 scratchers for the first few winners and a bunch of $1 scratchers for subsequent winners. Now there was even more on the line! People wanted to get a bingo for bragging rights, but they also wanted to get the first pick of a scratcher that could be worth some real money. We tacked up a giant poster board with all the possible spaces on it and would manually mark off things as they happened, that way as parents had to help kids with snacks, use the bathroom, or go get more beer, they didn't have to miss game events or commercials that might help their bingo cards.

Every year, we kept doing this, and I kept making these bingo cards manually using Microsoft Word and by searching Google to see who had bought ad time that year for the Super Bowl. By 2024, I had turned this into an Excel file with some complicated logic and formulas. I had a master library of potential spaces, with the text and images associated with those spaces, on one sheet. Then I had another sheet that would create reference codes to those spaces in an array. Finally I had a sheet for card generation that would take those arrays, merge the appropriate text and images, and create a printable card that I could turn into PDFs or print out for actually playing the game. I used AI to write a Python script that would generate the spaces I needed, with the customizations I wanted, and then I could copy and paste the output from the Python script to the Excel sheet for the reference codes. This was a major improvement and time saver! I put this code and example spreadsheets on Github here.

But as AI improved and Vibe Coding became a thing, I knew I could make it better, more interactive, and web-based. So, I've come full circle. Now, I've deployed another one of those free Bingo sites that allows users to generate cards to play bingo, SuperCustomBingo.com. This web app was almost entirely vibe coded using Firebase Studio, until the app got larger and the context window for Gemini started to suffer on the web, and so I moved it to VS Code while retaining the Firebase backend. It uses all the same customization logic that I used in my earliest games, but now game hosts can generate bingo games with built in chat and leaderboards for all kinds of games! There's pre-built templates for The Big Game, but also templates for Road Trip Bingo, and License Plate Bingo, and Zoo Bingo. Or game hosts can do whatever they want. I recently used it for a series of big company sales kick-off meetings with my team to start the year off with some fun!

So, that's the story of how SuperCustomBingo.com became a thing. I'm a hobby developer with no formal training, using AI, to develop something I needed and though I might as well make it useful for the world. I may make the app open-sourced soon so that other people with more knowledge and skills than I can add other features to it and improve it. If you have any questions, let me know using the Contact Form.