Series cliche bingo card

Each square is a cliche. You tap it when it happens on screen, and the first person to complete a line of five wins. The centre square comes marked already, the way a paper card does.

It only works as a game if everybody has the same card, which is why this one has a seed: send the link and the whole room opens the exact same twenty five squares.

Longer than it feels. Simulating four hundred thousand games, the first line takes eighteen different cliches on average, which is more than half the list of thirty two.

That makes it a game for a whole episode, not for the first ten minutes. If you want it shorter, agree beforehand that a full column also wins, or play with two cards each.

Almost not at all, and that is the surprising part. The centre sits on four of the twelve lines, a third of them, so it looks like a big head start.

In the same simulation it moves the average from eighteen point nine cliches to eighteen point zero, less than one cliche. What decides the game is the luckiest of the twelve lines, and the free square is not usually on it.

A card takes twenty four squares from a list of thirty two, which is ten million five hundred eighteen thousand three hundred different cards. In a room of thirty people the chance of a repeat is around one in ten million.

The seed is what makes a card come back: type it again, or open the link, and the same twenty five squares return. Nothing is stored, and the seed rides in the part of the link that never reaches a server.