What needs to come first is the investment. “So the rot has stopped, if that’s the right word, but we’re not into growth just yet. In 2014, George Osborne halved the tax on bingo halls, from 20% to 10%, and the decline began to slow, “almost but not quite to flat, so now it’s kind of level, maybe a whisper south of level,” says Baron. It sounds a lot better when you say it like that.” “So if you want to multiply, that’s 44 million a year.

“We know there are about 850,000 visits a week,” says Baron. Just before the smoking ban, there were about 600. Twenty years ago, there were about 1,200 commercial bingo clubs in the country. Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi/The Guardian These cards are beloved by millions, and they’ve been around for more than a century, while the game of Loteria itself is much older than that.Man Alive … winners go wild at Rebel Bingo. For those that haven’t played yet, here’s what all fifty-four of the traditional Loteria cards look like, courtesy of the classic set produced by Don Clemente / Pasatiempos Gallo.

Many of you have played Loteria with me at large assemblies and featured events when I make my convention road appearances - some of you for the first time ever –and the energy from those games is fantastic and contagious. All of those old-school cards are packed with memory and nostalgia. She would pick a few random cards, show them to me, turn them over and then I’d have to remember which cards were where. My grandma used Loteria cards to play concentration games. Curanderas (fortune tellers) use them as a personal ‘tarot’ to tell fortunes. Bingo is played with random selections of letters and numbers, but with Loteria, it’s the shuffle of a fifty-four card picture deck that creates the agony and the ecstasy.

If you know how to play traditional Bingo, then you know how to play the game.

When I was a kid, I played Loteria (AKA ‘Mexican Bingo’) with my family.

Old fashioned bingo game new mexico