tombola

About tombola

Britain’s biggest bingo site was famous for many years for not having any slots as such; instead it had (and still has) games such as Pulse, Paper, Morph, Stakeback (previously known as Hex) and the card game Cinco that you won’t find anywhere else.   Paradoxically, the lack of slots was part of the reason behind its enduring popularity as some players preferred not to have the temptation of slots especially if they are on a limited budget.  We say “was” because tombola did bring in slot games back in 2016 – but NOT the slot games you would normally expect to find at a bingo site, as we shall see, and to this day there are no slot games available inside the bingo rooms.

Once an entirely independent and very British enterprise based in Sunderland, tombola is now owned by Flutter whose other properties include Paddy Power.  It’s still very different to Flutter’s other sites.

Bingo at tombola

A notable advantage of tombola is that many of their bingo rooms have a maximum number of players allowed in the room (with multiple rooms available for every game and price point to accommodate everyone who wants to play) and the maximum number of tickets that each player is allowed to buy is relatively low (for some of the games it is one ticket per player).  This ensures that the chance of winning doesn’t get too small.  The 90 ball bingo is split into “clubs” to keep player numbers reasonable, but they periodically link together for big money games to give everyone the best of both worlds.  Although there is no pre-buy apart from for headline big money games, all of their rooms are lively pretty much all of the time so it’s easy just to drop in and find substantial prizes to play for and plenty of people to chat with.

As well as 90, 80, 75 and 50 ball bingo rooms, tombola have a unique 60 ball bingo variant plus a number of single ticket and/or multi stake bingo games which have clearly been designed to work optimally on a phone screen – Potion, Paper, and Blocks for example.  So if you get bored with one form of bingo, there’s always something different to try. They also have a great choice of low cost bingo games.  There’s bingo lite (90 ball) where tickets are 2p each or 10p a strip, the single ticket games Morph and Potion with stakes starting at 5p, and Paper where you can buy 1-5 tickets at 1p each.

A relatively recent innovation at tombola is time limited seasonally themed bingo games with fun interactive features, for example Bloom which had a limited run in Spring 2022. There have been a number of other seasonal games and we expect to see more of them in the future as well as initiatives such as Britain’s Biggest Bingo.  Introduced in autumn 2022, this £100,000+ game was unique amongst online bingo games in having 100% return to player and the first two games both ended up with a full house prize of more than £200,000.  It played on the first of each month with advance ticket sales available during the previous month and ran until summer 2023.

Other Games at tombola

There are none of the usual slot games at tombola.  Instead, they launched their own low cost, high RTP instant win games (maximum £2 per play, up to 98% RTP) on a separate site called tombola arcade.

Players could use their tombola bingo login and wallet to access tombola arcade without needing to open a new account and the arcade site even had the same chat moderators, but because the instant win games were kept on a separate site to the bingo and required them to login again it was still easy for players to avoid temptation if that’s what they wanted.  It wasn’t until 2024 that tombola finally brought all their slot and instant games on to their main site along with the bingo.  Today, there are more than 60 of these arcade games aavailable to play including more than 30 slot games plus scratchcards, card games, bubble pop games and their own progressive jackpots.

Other Important Things about tombola

Chat and community is absolutely huge at tombola, for arcade games as well as for bingo, and the chat hosts all have bags of personality which really comes out in their frequent social media postings.

They also usually have one or two daily free games (apart from in November and December when they are replaced by I’m A Celebrity promotions and the tombola Advent Calendar). Over the last few years tombola have given away millions of pounds to players via these free to play daily games and other promotions such as the I’m A Celebrity tombolabugs scratchcards.

Apple and Android apps are available for play on the go and were updated in Summer 2023 to add extra features. tombola also score very highly on player safety and security.  Responsible gambling controls include the facility to freeze individual games, player funds are held in an independent trust account which is the highest level of protection possible, and their customer support is super responsive 24/7.

Final Thoughts

All in all, there is much to recommend this unique bingo and slots site – if you don’t already have an account there!