How to Play Fun Bingo Games

Design your board. The traditional bingo board has five columns with five squares each. The center square is a free spot. Design a board to teach the alphabet and phonics and fill the board with different letters. When using bingo as an icebreaker, fill the bingo board with fun facts such as "I am left handed" or "I have a dog." For a birthday party, replace the letters B, I, N, G and O with the letters of the child's name. This may mean creating a board that has more squares than a standard bingo board. Design your board on the computer using a standard word-processing program.

Print the board out on cardstock. For a sturdier board, print the design on paper and glue to foam-core board or cardboard. Give each player a board.

Pass out markers. Any small object will work as a bingo marker, so choose markers that go with your game. When playing bingo at a Halloween party, use candy corn for markers. For children's birthday parties, use candy, small toys or foam shapes. For an adult birthday party, print and pass out several thumbnail pictures of the birthday boy. For alphabet bingo, use foam or magnetic letters to mark the spaces. Icebreaker bingo games don't require markers. Instead, ask players to collect the signatures of people who fit the situation in each space.

Call out the spaces on the board. For young players learning phonics with an alphabet bingo board, call out the sounds each letter makes and ask the child to cover the letter with a marker. For icebreakers, ask the players to question each other instead of calling out the facts on the board.

Award prizes to the winners. There is more than one way to win bingo, which means there is more than one way to win a prize. Traditionally, covering all the squares in a straight line -- either vertically or horizontally -- wins a prize. Another way to win is to collect markers on each of the four corners. For icebreaker bingo, require a cover-all. This means the first player to fill in all the squares on the board wins.