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What is Bubble Bingo?
Bubble Bingo is a new bingo game at Tombola, following in the footsteps of games such as Potion and Morph which have been designed to play well on mobile phone screens.
What makes Bubble Bingo so different?
Tombola bingo games often stray quite far from the classic 90 ball and 75 ball forms of the game, and in this respect Bubble Bingo really takes the biscuit! Not only does it not have any balls or numbers, it doesn’t even have anything that is recognisable as a card.
So what does it have instead? 30 bubbles floating on the screen! In itself this doesn’t seem too radical; bingo games such as the Gala Bingo exclusive Bingo Beats and Tombola’s own Pulse use a similar setup. In these games, though, the aim is to burst all your bubbles and that’s not the case in Bubble Bingo.
Pulse, for example, is a 36 ball game; 12 bubbles on the screen bear numbers between 1 and 36 and – just as in regular 90 ball bingo – when a number is called the bubble with the matching number bursts. So basically, the 12 numbered bubbles form a 12 number card.
Bubble Bingo is not like this at all; every screen has 30 identical looking bubbles which burst one at a time so every player is always at the same stage regarding how many bubbles they have left.
Bubble Bingo; playing the game
This brings us to the actual aim of the game, which is to collect sets of coloured marbles. Each bubble contains a red, green or blue marble and when it bursts, the marble is collected in the corresponding collection meter. The first player (or players) to collect a set of 10 marbles of any colour, wins.
If you think this sounds a bit familiar you’re absolutely right – there’s already a game called Bubble on Tombola! The earlier game isn’t a bingo game though – it’s an instant win game over on Tombola Arcade. Just as in the bingo game, you burst bubbles to collect coloured marbles, and win by completing sets of the same colour.
What we aren’t entirely clear about is what determines which order a player’s bubbles burst in and what’s inside them. In other words, is there an underlying number (or other label) tied to a silent calling mechanism (“everybody pop bubble 14 now!”) or does it work more like lots of people playing scratchcards in parallel with each other (which might make it Not Really Bingo)?
Regardless of how the bubble popping part of the game works, there are aspects of the game that most definitely ARE bingo:
- The prize money is determined by the ticket sales
- It’s a race between players and the first to bingo (or in this case, collect a set) wins
What else do I need to know about Bubble Bingo?
Bubble Bingo has launched in six rooms, one of which is only open in the evenings, and each room has its own chat. It’s a single ticket multi-stake game; you choose to buy in at 10p, 25p, 50p, £1 or £2 and the prize you’ll win is adjusted proportionately. There’s a fixed jackpot of 500x stake for winning in 14 calls or fewer.
Bubble Bingo has another thing apart from the bubble popping theming in common with Pulse; it is possible for a Bubble Bingo room to be full and we believe this happens when there are around 90 players. Having a room limit means that the chance of winning can’t get as ridiculously low as it has in the past when new bingo games have attracted hundreds or even thousands of players. Like most Tombola bingo games, Bubble Bingo has RTP of 80% or more.
The game certainly seems to be popular with players so far, but is it just too different to regular bingo to become a staple? Time will tell!
