In October, to celebrate 10 years of Star Wars Rebels, Star Wars Geek Girl hosted a Rebels Trivia Bingo. It was a really fun event, and a few lucky winners got sent some very cool prizes! But how do you make your own trivia bingo? Here is my step-by-step guide on how you can make trivia bingo happen for you!
Step One: Categories (or not)
The first thing you need to decide is whether or not you want categories for your trivia bingo. Personally, I like having categories because it makes it easier for players to find whatever you call because they only have to look in one column. Regular bingo has it too- B is only 1-15, I is 16-30, and so on. You don't HAVE to have categories, but I would recommend it.
Categories should be easy (even if not perfect) ways to divide what your questions will be about. For Rebels Bingo, the categories were Rebel Characters, Imperial Characters, Other Characters, Planets and Ships.
When making your categories, just make sure they're not TOO specific. If you want to use a regular bingo caller (which is what I did), each category needs to have 15 answers in it. So for Rebels Bingo, I couldn't make a category that was just the Ghost Crew because there's only 6 of them.
Step Two: Questions/Statements
Now, it's time to actually prepare the trivia. This step is a bit layered. The first thing you have to do is create the answers to the trivia. You will need to make 75 answers total (15 per category). While making your answers, you may realize you need to change up the categories you made, and that is totally okay!
When you come up with your answers, assign each one a number 1-75. Your numbers 1-15 should be from your first category (your "B" column), numbers 16-30 should be your second category (your "I" column), and so on. Lay them out in a spreadsheet or table, and then create a trivia question/statement that matches up to each one.
Be very careful when creating the trivia questions! You need to make sure that each one can ONLY apply to one of your potential answers, otherwise it will create a lot of confusion. For example, in Rebels Bingo I couldn't make one of my questions "this character was first created for The Clone Wars" because that would've applied to Rex, Ahsoka and Hondo! If I called it, people might mark a character I didn't intend for them to mark while still getting the trivia correct. This might mean making some of your questions feel a little TOO specific, but it's better to lean that way than the other way.
After you create all of your documents, make sure that they're set up in a way where it's easily accessible while playing the game so that you can find the questions and answers quickly. For me, I had them set up on a table in a Google Doc in numeric order so that I could quickly scroll through and find everything while playing.
If you want an example of how I had mine laid out, I have the Google Doc public here.
Step Three: Making Bingo Cards
Now that we know what all of the answers are going to be, it's time to make your cards!
First, you need to decide how your answers will be represented on the cards. If your answers are characters, for example, it's up to you if you write names in the squares or instead put pictures of them on the cards. Names would certainly be a lot simpler to make the cards with (and a lot easier on your printer if you're making physical cards), but pictures could be more fun and interesting to look at.
If you do use pictures, I'd recommend deciding whether or not you also want to label the images. For Rebels Bingo, I labelled planets because I used a lot of whole-planet pictures, which I knew would make them very difficult to distinguish if someone was colorblind. In hindsight though, I would also label my ships, as while playing the game there was some confusion where not everyone knew names of ships (even if they got the trivia right) and had a hard time describing them while verifying their bingo calls.
Whether using images or not, there are a lot of custom bingo card generators online to make this process fast. I, however, wanted to use specific pictures and have control over the design of my cards, so I used Photoshop to create them. It was a bit more involved and time-consuming, but I like how they turned out.
The first thing I did was create the layout of my cards, with the 5x5 grid, the "BINGO" the top, and then symbols to show chich category is which. If you don't want to use symbols, text to divide categories would also suffice, or you don't have to show categories at all.
Then afterwards, it was time to find all of my images. I found an image for each of the 75 categories and cropped/sized it to fit inside of one of the squares on the grid. In Photoshop, I put each image into folders per the categories. Then I used an online bingo card generator to create standard bingo cards with numbers, and I placed the images in accordance to where their assigned numbers where, hiding any that weren't being used in that card. I would export each individual card into a png file before moving on to the next on.
So if the number-generated bingo card said 5 was in the top left corner, I would hide whichever picture was in that spot, unhide the picture of Sabine (who was number 5), drag her to that box, and then move on to the next number.
If you have photoshop, you can actually download my template with all of the Rebels images here, whether you want to have your own Rebels Bingo or use it as a template to make a different trivia bingo.
Just make sure you have enough cards for everybody!
Step Four: Setting Up
So we have our bingo cards, now it's time to set up for the game! You'll need a few more things before you're ready to play.
The most important will be your bingo caller. There are real, physical ones that you can get, like this one on Amazon. They can be fun, but you don't need them! There are plenty of bingo caller apps for your phone, or web-based ones like this one. When you use a bingo caller, make sure that it either tracks already-called numbers for you, or that you yourself have a means of writing down or otherwise keeping track of what numbers are called. This is important for verifying bingo calls.
The rest of set-up relies on some of the specifics of your game. Make sure your cards are ready to be given out to your players (whether that's printed physically or sent digitally), that your playing space is ready (again, whether that's a physical room you're all in or an online call like Discord), and so on.
If you're giving out prizes, make sure you've decided ahead of time how those will be given too. When we played Rebels Bingo, I let the first round winner have first pick of the six prizes, the second round winer picked afterwards, and so on, all done via email. You could also give each round a designated prize, which could make things move quicker since you don't have to wait for people to select which prize they may want.
Step Five: Playing the Game
You did it! You created your cards, you set up the game, and now it's time to PLAY!
Running the game is pretty similar to running a regular bingo game, with a few extra sets. You'll use your bingo caller to pull numbers. When you pull a number, just find which question matches up in the super awesome and organized document you made, and read the question to your players. You'll repeat this until someone calls bingo.
Once they call, you'll have to verify their call. This is something they do in regular bingo, but it's extra important in trivia bingo, because someone could have gotten a question wrong! Have the player tell you which squares gave them bingo, and if they match up with which questions you called- then you have a winner!
The rest of the details are up to you- if you want to stick to regular bingo rules, do "4 Corners," "Blackout," if they clear boards between every round, and so on. Have fun with it, and go play some awesome trivia bingo of your own making!
If you want to hear some more Rebels Bingo discussion, you can listen to my dad and I talk about on this episode of the podcast!
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