Buzzword bingo is a bingo style game played with words instead of numbers. The game was apparently invented by Tom Davies, one of the founders of SGI, in 1993.
The players prepare bingo cards with buzzwords and cross them off as they are mentioned. The words are typically arranged in a 5 by 5 grid. The goal of the game, as in normal bingo is to tick off all the words on the bingo card and shout ‘Bingo’.
The location of play varies, but the game is typically associated with boring corporate meetings. This is because these types of meetings lend themselves to a certain corporate language that uses common words. Typical words include ‘synergy’, ‘collaboration’, ‘brainstorming’ and ‘strategize’.
A fun variation is to add words that would normally never be mentioned in the playing environment and steer the meeting in such a way that the word is mentioned. You could award additional bonus points for this. Of course, one of the rules is that the players cannot speak a buzzword in order to mark it off their own card, which is cheating.
If you wish to play buzzword bingo there are a number of websites that supply pre-made bingo cards. If you want to use your own buzzwords there are also websites where you can enter these and they automatically place them in a grid for you.
Buzzword bingo has been cited as a way of making boring meetings fun, but part of the fun is having the guts to stand up and yell ‘bingo’.
I’ve burnt my brain out just thinking about playing buzzword bingo, it sounds more complicated than it needs to be, I’ll just stick to 90 ball