B-I-N-G-O and bingo was the game-o!

I put together a bingo game for Romcon 2013. After I'd been asked to do a Bingo game during lunch on Friday at the Reader Conference in Colorado Springs, I put out a call to authors for a copy of their cover and $5 to cover printing and set up. I also asked them to send books or prizes for the winners.

Boy did the authors come through! Even when I had to ask for their covers a second time because my computer crashed they were all gracious and resent the covers. Then I put the covers in folders labeled: Western, Historical, Contemporary, Paranormal, and Suspense.

My daughter designs my covers and is a wizard at math so I gave her the job of making the bingo cards. She found software on the internet that formulated how to mix up the covers. She numbered them and went to work. I went to work putting the author names and websites on a page for the back of the card.

Me reading the powerpoint

At home, I made a power point of the covers, with the hope to have the covers displayed on a screen. I rolled a dice using the numbers to correlate with the columns: one-western, two- historical, three-contemporary, four- paranormal, and five- suspense. If the number was a three, then I wrote Contemporary at the top of the powerpoint slide and inserted the covers in the order they were in the folder each time I rolled a three. This was how I randomly set up the covers to show at the event. However, the event was in an atrium that was to light to make use of the poser point other than for me to call out the covers and authors.

At the event, I passed out a card and two rolls of smarties to use as the tokens to place on the called cover. The problem was there wasn't any room on the tables to leave their cards flat and still be able to have their lunch. So, they were allowed to eat the smarties and use a pen to mark off the covers. I'd initially wanted the covers unmarked for when they took the cards home. Oh well, best laid plans.

Participants juggling lunch and cards

When a participant filled their first row either across, up and down, or diagonal they received a prize. In some cases it was several books. We started running out of the packaged prizes and were handing out individual ones before Candice finally filled her card and won the gift basket from Anna Kathryn Lanier. We had only 12 covers left to reveal when a card was filled and only minutes to spare for the end of lunch. So, the event filled the time perfectly!

Barbara Vey of Publishers Weekly was there having a good time, and she facebooked and tweeted about the event. Afterwards every time I saw Michele(one of the coordinators) she said, "Bingo was a huge hit! Everyone is talking about it! That leads me to believe it was totally worth my time and the author's prizes.

Would I do it again next year? Possibly. It just depends on what is happening in my life at that time.