During the quarantine, one family activity we’ve begun is weekly virtual meetings with family members we’ve been prevented from seeing face-to-face. To add some structure and fun to the meetings, we play simple games like Bingo. It occurred to me that it might be even more fun and interesting to personalize our Bingo games.
For example, take my favorite TV family, The Bundys:
Now, suppose the Bundys were to reunite virtually for a family get together and decided to play a personalized game of Bingo in the manner I’m proposing. They might first create a list of their names: Al, Peggy, Kelly, and Bud. They might add other names to the list like Steve, Marcy, and Jefferson. They could add memorable events like “Polk High” and “Four Touchdowns”, family vacations including “Dumpwater, Florida” and “Lower Uncton, England” and possessions such as “the Dodge” and “Buck the dog”.
Based off a previous post of mine, they could generate personalized bingo cards like so:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.style as style
import numpy as np
import random
%matplotlib inline
style.use('seaborn-poster')
bundy_data = ['Al', 'Peg', 'Kelly', 'Bud', 'Buck', 'Steve', 'Marcy', 'Jefferson', 'Griff', 'Gary\'s\nShoes', 'Polk High',
'Four\nTouchdowns', 'Shoe\nSalesman', 'Lucky', 'Dumpwater,\nFL', 'No Ma\'am', 'Wanker\nCounty', 'Dodge',
'Bob\nRooney', 'Officer\nDan', 'Psycho\nDad', 'Ike', 'Seven', 'Anthrax', 'Jim\nJupiter', 'Sticky\nthe Clown',
'Love &\nMarriage', 'Grandmaster\nB', 'chicken', 'Lower\nUncton', '9674\nJeopardy Ln', 'Ferguson\ntoilets',
'Chicago']
rowlen = 5 # bingo cards are usually 5x5
fig = plt.figure(figsize=(8, 8))
ax = fig.gca()
ax.set_xticks(np.arange(0, rowlen + 1))
ax.set_yticks(np.arange(0, rowlen + 1))
plt.grid()
_ = ax.set_xticklabels([])
_ = ax.set_yticklabels([])
for i, ltr in enumerate('BUNDY'):
x = (i % rowlen) + 0.4
y = 5.0
ax.annotate(ltr, xy=(x, y), xytext=(x, y), size=20, weight='bold')
random.shuffle(bundy_data)
for i, phrase in enumerate(bundy_data[:rowlen**2]):
x = (i % rowlen) + 0.29
y = int(i / rowlen) + 0.5
ax.annotate(phrase, xy=(x, y), xytext=(x, y))
The host calling out the bingo squares to mark could simply run Python code like below to generate a random list of squares to call:
nbr_of_picks = 20 # generate, say, 20 squares to call
for i in np.arange(nbr_of_picks):
print('{0} - {1}'.format(random.choice('BUNDY'), random.choice(bundy_data).replace('\n', ' ')))
This would generate a list like so:
Y - Marcy
Y - Steve
B - Dodge
N - Ike
U - Grandmaster B
U - Lucky
U - Gary's Shoes
N - Griff
U - Steve
U - Marcy
Y - Bud
B - Psycho Dad
B - Polk High
N - Officer Dan
B - Dodge
B - Wanker County
Y - Anthrax
U - chicken
Y - Shoe Salesman
B - Ferguson toilets
If your family name is not five characters long, you could of course use “BINGO” instead or make your cards larger or smaller accordingly. And, of course, come up with your own personal family names, events, and so on for the card data.
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