The first bingo of the Spring 2025 semester will happen on Feb. 5 in the Collins Arena. It will start at 6:30 p.m., and you must bring a student ID to walk-in. There will be no theme for this bingo despite the flurry of themes for bingo night last semester. However, pizza and dozens of prizes are still expected.
Last semester, three of the four Bingo nights corresponded with the holidays. The bingo night days before Halloween featured a costume contest. There was pumpkin pie at the bingo night before Thanksgiving. The last bingo night of the Fall 2024 semester hosted an ugly sweatshirt competition and served sugar cookies.
The poster doesn’t show any signs of a theme, despite the fact that the bingo night will be days away from Valentine’s Day. However, the decoration and desserts at the event could still be in line with the holiday.
Aside from a theme, the math department will be the sponsor of the night. Sponsors at bingo nights usually ask attendees a handful of questions relevant to the sponsors’ office or organization. Attendees at this bingo should expect to answer questions about where the math lab is located and about tutoring to win a trivia prize.
Bingo nights have had greater attendance than usual. This could have been thanks to the competitions at the other bingos last semester, which brought in so many students that extra stacks of chair had to be wheeled into the Navesink rooms. The appeals of free food, prizes and varying themes have attracted plenty of people.
But this has led to a number of problems. With more people, it takes longer to fill out each bingo sheet (a pack of 10 are given to each player). For every one person that wins a prize, there could be two people who also got bingo but didn’t reach the prize table fast enough, which also led to an issue of people running to the prize table.
In response to when two bingo winners ran into each other, the staff decided to implement a no running rule. As to how they will deal with the other problems that have arisen with larger bingo mobs, that is yet to be seen.
