SkuDingBo - Bingo meets Sudoku

Bingo and Sudoku are both pretty boring games about putting numbers in grids, right? Sudoku is a bare minimum logic puzzle, and Bingo is mostly a game about trying not to fall asleep. But what if we combine the two?

Everyone gets a unique SkuDingBo¹ card, it's the standard 9x9 grid with a few starting clues, but not nearly enough information to start filling it in. 9 is always the center square, like the free space. Otherwise all the clues are different.

You would probably need more starting numbers than this.

Instead of just calling out a letter and number, you'd call out a grid coordinate (like K6, which on the example card already has the number 7 there) followed by what number goes there.

So in this example they'd have to call out "K6 - Seven" because someone already has that on their card. But for all the other players, that would be a new clue.

You would keep going like this, providing more and more clues until someone has enough information and the skill to solve the puzzle first. That player would then shout out "SkuDingBo!" (the best part of the game) and the emcee will tell the computer to check their work. If there are no errors, that player gets a point and everyone starts another round with a new set of cards. If s player calls out SkuDingBo but doesn't have the right solution, they forfeit that round and play continues with the remaining players.

Here's the caveat, which is that the game would need to be much more computer-focused than Bingo, which may turn some players off if the main thing they like about Bingo is getting to use those big markers. In fact, the easiest way to do it would be to have everyone on their phones connect to a central server that handles card management for the players, and clue allotment and answer-checking for the emcee. One of the big appeals of Bingo in the modern era is probably that it gives you something to do that's not using your phone, but that's the only sensible way to do it.

I mean, you could print out a set of physical cards for each puzzle, and bundle it with a deck of cards (or collection of ping-pong balls for the really fancy sets) with all the possible clues for the emcee, but you'd need a lot of these sets to cycle between or you run the risk of players memorizing layouts. Also, I think the game would really bog down when it's time to check a player's card for correctness. The player would have to personally bring their card to the emcee and they'd have to manually verify that the player's card matches the reference card. Probably not an issue for a small family gathering, but in a large SkuDingBo Hall it could be a drag. No, best to leave it up to the computer. With the right algorithm it could generate a basically infinite number of SkuDingBo setups on the fly.

Anyway, I'm not a good enough programmer to make this happen, but if anyone reading this is, go for it. I can give you a license to use the all-important SkuDingBo trademark for a very reasonable fee 🦝