Here are 20+ games you can play on Zoom and other conference call apps. All you need is a video calling device, audio, a pal and the occasional prop. Let’s take a look at how to play games on Zoom and similar video call sites. Each player just needs a bingo card and something to mark their card with to play. There are two ways to make Bingo Cards for home. Players can each make a card at home with 5 rows down and 5 rows across. Then fill in a number 1-75 of your choice for each square. Use this Bingo Number Generator to pick the random numbers to be called out while.
Still looking for some games you can play with your group while social distancing? This week we played Bingo, and it’s fairly simple.
You can do this many different ways. However it is easiest to use Zoom or Facebook live as long as you can share your screen.
Step 1 – Bingo Cards
Option 1: Printed or Online Cards
The first step was to find Bingo cards for everyone. MyFreeBingoCards.com makes this easy and free for up to 30 players. Click on the link that says 30 cards for free.
Once you do you’ll be given the option to download the cards in pdf. Instead, you can get an individual link for each card that can be texted or emailed.
Link to boards:set of 100 colorful: of 100 plai. What game can be more exciting to play with friends other than finding imposter Among. The idea of bringing bingo to the home is now possible using Zoom, where we will all meet in our Virtual Bingo Hall and our bingo caller will be visible and monitoring players checks.” The association will use the popular ClubForce App used by many local GAA clubs for lotto.
The online cards actually allow you to play virtually and mark them as you play using your phone, tablet or computer.
Email or text the cards out to everyone playing. I would suggest doing this earlier in the day or the day before so that you can start
Option 2: Make Your Own
With a small group it might be easy to have everyone make their own cards. Post some instructions ahead of time on what the letters and numbers should be. It needs to be a 5×5 grid with Bingo in letters across the top. Then they choose 5 numbers under each letter from the following choices B 1-15, I 16-30, N 31-45, G 46-60, O 61-75.
Bingo Calling
Some of you may have a bingo set at your house. However, for the rest of us I found a great option. Go to letsplaybingo.io. This is a simple and absolutely free bingo caller program that automatically calls and displays called numbers. Everyone seeing the screen can hear and see each ball called.
Other options could include using a bingo cage you have at the church or at home. Or you could make slips of paper with the numbers on them and call out that way.
Video Set Up
Here is where you have a few options.
Zoom Bingo Online
Option 1 – Cell Phone Video
The first option is to set your phone in front of your computer screen and broadcast to instagram live or Facebook live. Those who get a bingo could text you.
Option 2 – Zoom
A second option would be to use the screen share function of Zoom to share the bingo caller window with everyone. In addition, make sure and share the audio as well.
Option 3 – Zoom and Facebook Live
Finally you can use the screen share function of Zoom to then share on Facebook live. This is what the guys at stuffyoucanuse do with their trivia games.
Zoom Meeting Bingo
It’s a little more intricate set up but it will allow many people to follow along. And you won’t have to worry about zoom invitations and so many people in one call.
I hope that this is helpful as we continue to all look for ways to engage our youth and church during the coronavirus lockdown. For more coronavirus resources please check out our Covid-19 Resource Page
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The other day, I was on a call that felt more like a reverse Turning Test in which the human on the other end was trying to their hardest to imitate the cold, detached logic of a machine. It conjured up all the frustration that one feels while navigating an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) decision tree; but, with the added insult that I was, in reality, talking to a sentient being, albeit one that refused to acknowledge its own sentience. It made me think of the 'Zoom Bingo' games that have taken root in this Pandemic landscape. And, as a way to process some of my dissatisfaction that I'm feeling, I thought it might be fun to try and build one of those Zoom Bingo games in Angular 10.1.2.
Run this demo in my JavaScript Demos project on GitHub.
View this code in my JavaScript Demos project on GitHub.
CONTENT CREDIT: The goal of this experiment was simply to build the game, not to come up with the game phrases. As such, I have 'borrowed' the phrases for this demo from the Vault.com article: Zoom Call Bingo (With Cards!) for Your Next Meeting. Their article has nice printable cards that you should check out!
Because this demo is a client-side-only application built with Angular 10, I wanted the foundational state of the game to be stored in the URL. This way, one could configure the phrases within the game and then copy-paste the URL to a co-worker who would then be able to see the same game, albeit with a randomized selection of phrases. Free online keno.
To that end, I'm storing the configured phrases as a Base64Url-encoded value on the window.location.hash. At first, I tried to use the Location service provided by Angular. But, this service appears to be more of foundational part of the Routing than it does a usable abstraction over the window.location object. In the end, reading from and writing to the window.location API was an easy implementation detail.
The Zoom Bingo game is composed of three components:
- The
AppComponent, which glues it all together. - The
BingoBoardComponent, which renders the configured phrases as an interactive 5x5 Bingo board. - The
FormComponent, which allows the phrases for the game to be configured.
And, as an experimental feature, I'm using the html2canvas library to take a screenshot of the board and render it as an <img> tag on the page. This way, you can share your Bingo victories with the rest of your team.
The demo isn't very complicated; but, there are a few moving parts. So, before we look at the code, let's look at the outcome that we're trying to achieve. The following image showcases the general flow of the game, including the screenshot functionality:
Now that we see what kind of interactive outcome we're trying to achieve, let's take a look at some code. And, I think it might be easiest to look at the code from the bottom-up. The AppComponent is the glue that binds it all together; so, before we look at the root component, let's look at the smaller components that we're gluing together.
First up, the BingoBoardComponent. This component takes an input array of [phrases] and then selects 25 random values which it displays using CSS Grid. If it does not receive 25 phrases from which to select, it will pad the values with the filler phrase, (Free Space):
The selectedIndices index is just a look-up that stores which spaces have been toggled by the user. And, thanks to the magic of CSS Grid, the View template for this component is super simple:
The next low-level component is the FormComponent. Like the BingoBoardComponent, the FormComponent also takes an array input of [phrases] which it uses to initialize a collection of form fields. This allows the user to add or alter as many phrases as they want. And, when when the submit the form, this component emits a (phrasesChange) event:
You'll notice that there is no special 'form data' object in this component - just an array of PhraseOption instances. That's because template-driven forms in Angular have all the power of reactive forms; but, without all of the ceremony of having to configure data ahead of time. This way, we just loop over our values and let ngModel do the heavy-lifting for us:
So far, pretty straightforward - we have a BingoBoardComponent and a FormComponent, both of which use OnPush change-detection and work exclusively using input and output bindings. On their own, each is fairly easy to reason about. Now, let's look at the AppComponent - the glue that holds this all together.
Monopoly slots on facebook. The AppComponent has a few responsibilities:
- It handles the game mode (playing or editing).
- It reads-in game state from the URL.
- It persists game state to the URL (for sharing).
- It performs the Base64Url encoding and decoding.
- It takes a screenshot of the bingo board using html2canvas.
The AppComponent comes with a default set of phrases, which it will use (and persist to the URL) if no other phrases are provided in the URL.
Half of the complexity in this component ends-up being the screenshot invocation. So, if you are not concerned with that, feel free to skip-over the takeScreenshot() method:
The view for the AppComponent is fairly small as well as it is primarily relies on rendering the two other Angular components that we've already looked at:
And that's all there is to it. It's obviously not the most robust game - and it doesn't do anything like warn people if they are about to refresh their game accidentally. But, it was a fun little demo to put together. For me, there were a few critical take-aways:
Template-driven forms are very simple and very powerful and remove much of the complexity and ceremony of reactive forms.
Mutating data structures is perfectly safe - even optimal - when performed as an 'implementation detail'; and, did not in any way affect our ability to adhere to a uni-directional, one-way data flow.
NgModelis one of the best things since sliced-bread - despite all the haters.Storing state in the URL is an easy way to share state without having a server-side persistence mechanism (though it does, of course, generate rather large URLs).
Zoom Bingo Funny
Anyway, hopefully some part of this Angular 10.1.2 demo was interesting for you.