Nevada, A Playing Card Bingo Game At Tombola

Those incredibly busy game developers at Tombola have been at it again!  Over the last few years they’ve come up with more new bingo games than the whole of the rest of the industry put together – Blocks, Potion, Morph, The Machine, Hex, Paper and now Nevada!

Nevada is a playing card based bingo game.  Tombola have already got one of those – the very popular Cinco – but Nevada is quite different.  The only thing the games really have in common apart from being based on playing cards is the RTP, which as usual at Tombola is guaranteed to be at least 80% (in case didn’t know, that’s pretty good going for a bingo game).

In Cinco, you buy up to 5 hands each of which contains 5 cards and the aim is to match all 5 cards in a hand before anyone else does. Stake levels in Cinco are 5p, 10p, 20p or 40p per hand and each stake level has its own rooms in a tab in the Cinco lobby; the rooms have an upper limit of around 75 players. While it’s possible to buy anything from one to five hands in a game of Cinco, other players who bought the full five hands will have a better chance of winning than you if you buy fewer.

Nevada, on the other hand, is a single ticket multi stake game.  You choose to buy in at 10p, 25p, 50p, £1 or £2 and the prizes on offer are adjusted to be a multiple of your stake level. Each player has just one ticket – a 4 x 4 array of playing cards – ensuring that everyone has an equal chance of winning, and each game has 3 prizes – 1 line, 2 lines and full house.  The lines have to be horizontal lines – vertical and diagonal don’t count.  As the game doesn’t end until someone has matched and flipped all 16 of their cards, it lasts quite a bit longer than a game of Cinco.

Like all of the other Tombola games that have been launched over the last few years, Nevada has clearly been designed with mobile phone screens in mind and works really well on mobile devices. You can play with the game taking up the full screen, or if you want to join in the always lively chat you can touch the speech bubble icon to pop up the chat window and rearrange the game in a smaller horizontal window where it is still perfectly viewable and playable and you can even buy tickets for the next game without closing the chat.

Nevada has two jackpots; 10,000x stake for a win in 28 or fewer calls and 1000x stake for a win in 31 calls.  The size of these prizes reflects how unlikely they are to drop, with most games taking 38-40 calls to finish.

Now here’s the problem with Nevada and indeed every other new game that Tombola have ever come up with – the HUGE Tombola player base and their insatiable appetite for new games!

On the day of launch, Nevada was running in 5 Las Vegas themed rooms and all of them were absolutely heaving with upwards of 200 players in each (one had more than 350 players).  With such a large number of tickets in the game, your chances of winning anything are going to be pretty small.   Once the game has been around for a while, the interest is likely to die down a bit and the rooms be less full (although that will also mean smaller prizes).

Nevertheless, Nevada is a fine piece of entertainment, especially as it’s playable for just 10p a game.  It will be interesting to see how it fares against the classic Cinco playing card game!

UPDATE: As a result of player feedback, Tombola have made a couple of changes to Nevada effective from 1st July.

1. A 3 line prize has been added to keep the game exciting all the way through.
2. There’s now just one jackpot of 500x stake, for winning in 33 calls or fewer.