How many items you actually want
The card size sets a floor and nothing else. A 5x5 card with a free centre needs 24 items, but running a game on exactly 24 means every player holds every item, which changes the game in a way most people do not intend. The interesting part of bingo is the call that lands on someone else's card and not on yours, and that only exists when the pool is bigger than the card.
| Card | Squares to fill | Minimum pool | Comfortable pool |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3x3 with free | 8 | 8 | 14 to 20 |
| 4x4 | 16 | 16 | 26 to 36 |
| 5x5 with free | 24 | 24 | 36 to 50 |
| 5x5 no free | 25 | 25 | 38 to 52 |
Roughly one and a half to two times the square count is the range where cards feel varied without the game dragging. Push much past double and you will call a long time before anyone gets a line, because most calls miss most cards.
Reading the two counts in the results
The result reports two different numbers and they answer different questions. Distinct layouts is how many cards exist if you count two cards with the same items in different squares as different cards — that is the permutation count, the pool taken 24 at a time in order for a standard 5x5. Distinct item sets is how many different collections of items exist, ignoring position, which is the combination count. The first is enormous almost immediately; the second is the one that matters if your players compare cards by content rather than by shape.
The collision line is the practical version of both. It uses the birthday calculation: with a few cards drawn from an enormous space, the chance any two match is negligible, and the page says so rather than printing a false zero. Where it stops being negligible is small pools with small cards — a 3x3 with a free square drawn from a pool of exactly eight has only 40,320 possible layouts, and twenty cards from that pool carry a real chance of a duplicate. Random does not mean distinct, and if you need guaranteed-unique cards you have to check them, not trust the draw.
Running the game
Keep the full item list somewhere the players cannot see and call from it in random order. The random picker elsewhere on this site works for that, or write the items on slips. Players mark a called item if it is on their card, and a completed row, column or diagonal wins. For a larger group, requiring two or three completed lines stretches a 5x5 from about ten minutes to twenty-five and avoids four people shouting at once on the same call.
For human bingo — squares like "has lived abroad" that players fill by finding a person who matches and getting a signature — generate one card and print the same one for everyone. Different cards defeat the purpose, because the point is that everyone is hunting the same twenty-four traits and colliding with each other while they do it.
Getting it onto paper
The copy box gives you tab-separated rows. Pasted into a spreadsheet each card lands as a proper grid you can size, border and print several to a page. Pasted into a word processor it becomes a table in most applications, though some will need a convert-text-to-table step with tab as the separator. Printing from this page directly works but wastes ink on the site furniture, so the spreadsheet route is usually better for anything above a handful of cards.
Questions people ask
Can two of my cards come out identical?
Yes, and the result tells you how likely it is for the pool and card count you chose. The generator draws each card independently rather than checking it against the ones before it, which is what makes the arrangement genuinely random. With any reasonably sized pool the chance is astronomically small. With a pool the same size as the card and a small grid it is not, and that is the one case worth checking by eye before you hand the cards out.
Why is the free square only offered on 3x3 and 5x5?
A free square belongs in the centre, and only odd-sized grids have one. A 4x4 has four middle squares and no single centre, so the option is ignored there and all sixteen squares are filled from your list.
Do duplicate lines in my list matter?
They are removed before anything is generated, matched without regard to capitalisation, and the count of what was dropped is shown in the results. Leaving a duplicate in would let the same item appear twice on one card, which makes that card easier in a way the other players cannot see.
Is my list sent anywhere?
No. The text stays in the page, the shuffling happens in your browser, and closing the tab discards it. There is nothing to delete afterwards and nothing to sign into.