Presidential Debate Bingo
Last night we watched the second Presidential Debate. Ben is a policy wonk and as for me, well . . . let’s say I should care more. It’s not that I’m apolitical. I have a passing to a fair amount of knowledge of all the major international and national issues and events. Certain issues I care about more than others, but I’m not up to my elbows in details.
Ben was really looking forward to watching the debate and I was really looking forward to playing Presidential Debate Bingo. There are several sites where they have bingo cards made, but you could easily make one up yourself. I’ve looked at several and personally, I liked the ones made by the Pittsburgh City Paper the best. There were six cards and the I felt that they had the most interesting and creative word choices. The word choices were high enough in frequency that they were likely to appear, but not so high that they would automatically appear and the game would be over in five minutes.
In this version of bingo, the instructions were:
TO PLAY: Every time a candidate — not the moderator — says the word in quotes listed on your card, cross off that square. Likewise if a candidate makes a reference to a category in capital letters (e.g. says “Navy” for ANY MILITARY BRANCH). The middle square is a freebie. Mark off any five squares in a row — vertical, horizontal or diagonal — and that’s a winning bingo. Alternatively, the player with the most crossed-off squares at the end of the debate wins.
It made listening to the standard talking points really fun. I never cared so much about “American jobs” in my life. I would groan every time I heard “jobs,” “manufacturing jobs,” or “good jobs.” Ben twisted with agony several times because both Obama and Romney would say “terror” and “terrorist,” but not “terrorism.” Ben won two rounds of Bingo. We both had fun.
A Fast Paced Life 