Just a note offering an opposing point of view.

I agree that in some games it is important that each kid is a winner. When I have my daughter's birthday party and we played "Chip Walk", a cake walk for small bags of chips, I put every kid's name twice in a bucket. Then I pull out a child's name, look quick to see what number they are on, and then announce that number. (Of course they never get to see the slips of paper.) This assures that each kid wins twice yet they don't know the game is rigged.

However, I guess I feel that Bingo with 150 to 200 kids is a game of luck, and we only had prizes for the Bingo winners and some went home empty. I did not hear of any tears afterwards. The prizes we had were $5 gift certificates for Target, Dairy Queen and Cold Stone Creamery, so for a kid it seemed like a great prize but as a PTO we only paid $300 for prizes. We had prepackaged bags of chips and cookies and pop which we sold for 50 cents a piece, and we made close to the $300 back from selling the food.

The biggest hint I can offer is to have the callers try to keep things going at a fast pace. We had only 2 cards each, and about as long as it took to get the little ball out they called the next number. Don't think just because they are little kids they need a lot of time, they can go pretty fast. Then once we had a winner they came up to pick a gift certificate while we started the next game. The first year we tried some cover alls and to make a T, but they seemed to like the straight bingo the best.

So the first year I would suggest you just play bingo for prizes and see how it goes.

We use the disposable paper bingo cards and just put cups of crayons on each table for markers. (One of the teachers gave us a huge plastic box of used crayons and we returned it to her later.)

Note - bingo is heavily regulated as it's considered gambling. Even to run a completely free game in our state would require an application and permit (which includes background checks on on volunteers). Sorry - but I find that absurd and an abysmal waste of government time and resources. Normally, I'm one for following ALL the rules, but if we were running a FREE game with no fees whatsoever, we might accidentally overlook that step.

[ 02-15-2006, 06:36 PM: Message edited by: JHB ]

We held our first Family Arts/Crafts & Game night the end of January. We had about 75 people participate. We let the kids do the crafts for the first 30 min. then started playing bingo. Those that didn't want to play bingo (only a few) could play board games we provided on separate tables. We provided cookies, popcorn, pretzels & goldfish crackers to snack on as well as bottles of water for free.

We played 8 games. One of the games we just kept playing until everyone won. We gave away candy bars (Candy Bar Bingo). We bought 4 or 5 boxes of candy bars from Costco and dumped them all in a tub for the winnners to come up and choose one out of if they won. We purchased the bingo cage and balls from Oriental Trading. It was a nicer set than I thought it would be. We also purchased paper bingo cards on Ebay. Each person had their own pack of 10. We used markers purchased also from Oriental Trading to mark them (too expensive to purchase daubers for everyone even though we are in Nevada and have casinos everywhere to get them from!). Everyone enjoyed it and we'll definately do it again.

Good luck to you,
Holly
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Our event was 2 hours, but we spent the first 45 minutes on dinner. In the course of the next 1 1/4 hours, we only cleared the cards 4 times. It's impossible to estimate how many games you'll play - depends on how fast someone wins, and whether you want to pull more numbers before you have everyone clear their cards. Maybe the pros have some kind of formula, but we don't!

We spent almost $1k of our budget on the food, so clearly we could have done the event for far less if we had just offered snacks. (470 guests)

This was the first year we had a count of kids vs. adults. It really helped us plan prizes. In the past, we just bought a bunch and hoped for the best. That's why some kids went home with nothing. Based on our count from this year, 55% of our guests were kids.

Thanks for your response. It gave me a lot of good ideas. I definitely will use your idea of the kids standing at the end so that everyone gets a prize. I'd hate to have any tears. Your school is fortunate, $2K for a free event! It makes me mad tht people complained that they didn't get a prize! How ungrateful! We don't have quite that budget, although I am confident it will still be nice. My only concern is having enough prizes. Would candy bars at the end to those who didn't win be cheezy? About how many rounds of Bingo did you have in that time? We won't be having dinner or any breaks.

As for how to control kids staying in seats if they have already one a prize next year... I read somewhere else that you get a ticket everytime you win and at the end you trade your tickets in for a prize. That might help you.

We just had our 4th annual bingo night last Friday. This year, rather than stress out over predicting how many winners we'd have, we planned one bingo prize per child. Our ticket reservation (no charge, but limited capacity) asked for the number of kids and adults per family. We bought enough prizes for each child. We got a great discount, but at face value our prizes were about $2.50-3.50 each, not just junky carnival prizes (ex: painting kit).

Each child (including non-student siblings) could win one bingo prize. Our volunteers randomly handed out prizes as kids raised their hands. We stamped their hand to show they'd won. You can control how fast the kids win by clearing the cards and starting a new game as soon as the first winner(s) raise their hands, or continuing to pull numbers without clearing the card so even more kids win in that round. We found that kids started to lose interest once they had won their prize, so next year we might give out tickets for kids who win more than once and pull tickets for anothe prize at the end of the event. We need an incentive for the kids to stay in their seats.

We had a firm "no trading" policy on the prizes. Kids could swap amongst other kids, but they couldn't take their pick from our prize boxes. Amazingly, the worst offenders were parents! Some parents were even obviously disappointed that they couldn't win a prize! Dinner, 2 hours of bingo, a prize for your kid, and loads of fun for free - what more did they want?!

In the last few minutes of the evening, we had every child who hadn't won stand on their chairs and we gave them each a prize. We had 8-9 parent volunteers monitoring the games and handing out prizes (we had 470 people there). One more thought: our prize chair worked hard to buy a variety of prizes, some boy/girl, some young/old. She separated the categories into different boxes. Alot more work than just a generic prize, but the kids liked the variety.

Our event was free, also. We spent about $2k on the whole thing. Hot/pizza, chips, carrots, cookie, pop, popcorn (real healthy dinner!), prizes, rented bingo board (we already own the cards), an incidentals. We ran 6:30-8:30, dinner followed by bingo - we first game was at 7:15. In the end, I think we only cleared the cards 4 times since we continued playing after the first winner so more kids would win.

We didn't planned 1:1 prizes last year. We allowed kids to win up to 2 times. Some kids got 2, some got 0. Tears. Not good. It was more work this year, but well worth the effort to collect the # of kid reservations and buy enough prizes.

Hope this helps. Follow up if you have more questions. This is all very fresh at our end.