Review for Bingo Clash: A Game That Hits the Spot
In Pocket7Games’ most popular game, you forget everything you thought you knew about bingo and go along for a really fun ride. Bingo Clash is totally different from any other bingo game I’ve ever played. As a youngish man, I never thought I’d be saying that. But here I am telling you how much fun I had in a game usually associated with people twice or even three times my age.
I’m not the only one. It’s the most-played game on the app. The high player population was the first sign that I should give it a shot, but it was the gameplay itself that kept me coming back for more.
The “Clash” part of its name got me excited. It made the game sound more menacing and a little bit less innocent. Luckily for me, there was a reason for the name, and it wasn’t simply for marketing. The gameplay was outstanding.
Gameplay and Features
Like the other skill games on the Pocket7Games app, Bingo Clash had the option to take a practice run and learn the rules through a tutorial. I was a bit surprised at how well it explained the unique mechanics. You might be asking, “It’s bingo, how complicated could it be?” Well, it’d been some time since I had even played the regular version of the game, so getting some hands-on experience with it was essential to creating a foundation on which I could build.
I entered the game and was immediately told to tap on the called number, which appeared at the top of the screen off to the right. Rather than just sitting around with a cup of lukewarm coffee like I remember doing in the bingo halls of the ’90s, I felt a sense of urgency. The clock at the top was counting down pretty quickly, and my score depended on how fast I could react to each number called.
While the basics still applied — listen for a number, check your card, mark it off, get five in a row, and then shout “Bingo!” — there were tons of different ways of increasing my total points, which was vital to winning head-to-head matches.
A feature unique to this version of Bingo was the free numbers you can get from filling up diamonds at the bottom of the screen. You get them by being quick to tap when a number you have is called. When one of them fills up, you can click it and pick either a randomly generated number or, if you’re lucky, get to pick any number on your card. There were times when this power-up made it so I was able to set up multiple bingos at once. When the perfect number hit, I could complete several lines at once, increasing my total score dramatically. That’s what you have to do to succeed in PVP.
PVP Mode
There were several different options for player-versus-player matches. Tournaments, money games, and Ticket games were all on offer, so you can definitely play bingo for money if you want. With my tapping finger freshly warmed-up from running through the tutorial multiple times, I jumped into a Ticket game. I knew that I wasn’t ready to play for real money yet, and that was proven by my performance in my first match.
There may have been a bit of misfortune, but I’m going to blame my downfall on my slow reaction time and poor eyesight. I’m really falling apart as I get older.
My opponent seemed to have mastered the multiple combinations method, which he could have picked up from the tips on the Facebook page or website, which I hadn’t had the smarts to visit beforehand. I was pretty lucky, getting an early “Bingo,” but I found myself not tapping quickly enough to fill up my diamonds. After a minute or two, I got my first one and realized just how game-changing they were. Hearing a few more numbers and getting some of my own from the diamonds gave me my first multi-Bingo, which dramatically increased my score compared to the single lines I’d been stuck getting previously. It was too little, too late though, and I fell in my first match. Luckily, it was easy to get back in the saddle and give it another go.
So, I did . . . over and over. It really was addicting trying to improve my score by ramping up my combinations. I had tons of fun playing a game I had preemptively misjudged.
Bingo Clash wasn’t what I thought it’d be. It was the best bingo game variation I’ve ever played.
