Date Placed Bingo Challenge Mystery Cache

Bingo History

Bingo first appeared in North America in 1929 and it was originally called "beano". It was first played at a carnival near Atlanta, Georgia. It was a country fair game where a dealer would select numbered discs from a cigar box and players would mark their cards with beans. They yelled "beano" if they won.

New York toy salesman Edwin S. Lowe renamed it "bingo" after he overheard someone accidentally yell "bingo" instead of "beano". He hired a Columbia University math professor, Carl Leffler, to help him increase the number of combinations in bingo cards. By 1930, Leffler had invented 6,000 different bingo cards. It is said that Leffler then went insane.

A Catholic priest from Pennsylvania approached Lowe about using bingo as a means of raising church funds. When bingo started being played in churches it became increasingly popular. By 1934, an estimated 10,000 bingo games were played weekly, and today more than $90 million dollars are spent on bingo each week in North America alone.

Challenge Requirements

1. Choose any bingo card from the 18 cards below. If you click on the card image, it will open a page to view or print the bingo card.
2. The dates on the cards represent the month and day the cache was hidden. Note, “hidden date” is different from “published date”. You have to find a cache on the same month and day the cache was hidden, but not necessarily the same year. If you find a cache on the day it was hidden, or the yearly anniversary of the date it was hidden, you can fill in the square with the GC number and the date you found it. For example, you can fill in 5/6 using a cache that was hidden on 5/6/2011 if you found it on its “birthday” of 5/6/2011, 5/6/2012, 5/6/2013, or 5/6/2014, etc. A checker is provided below to help you validate your eligibility.
3. When you have filled squares diagonally, across a row or vertically in a column, you have a "bingo" and you are eligible to log this challenge. There is a “free” square for a month-day combination that doesn’t exist in February.
4. The cache types that may be used are traditional, unknown, multi, letterbox, and whereigo.
5. Previous finds count including archived caches. This cache doesn't count.
6. Pre-finds of the physical cache before meeting the challenge requirements are allowed.

Cache

The cache is a small container hidden in the Webster Natural Area in Kingston, NH. This 89-acre property encompasses a rare Atlantic white cedar swamp, a pond and a bog. A woods road through the property makes for an easy hike into the center of this pristine habitat. You will probably see a variety of water birds, possibly even osprey or bald eagles, during migration.

FTF Table