catrancher

So at my guild this month, we played fabric bingo. It's a great idea, and I'll post pictures of my bingo "cards" so you can see what I'm talking about. We made 25-patches with the columns being colors: yellow, red, purple/pink, blue, green. Then within each color, we used fabrics to represent about 30 different categories; for example, novelty, 30's print, paisley, plaid, heart, star, stripe, solid, metallic, holiday, dot, etc. I think you get the idea. Then we used buttons to mark our spaces. The center space on the card was a free space, and filled in with black fabric.

So when we played the game, the caller would call out blue dot, or red heart, or yellow plaid, or green metallic, and we would fill in the spots with our buttons until someone had bingo. Then, after making certain they had all the fabrics marked and called correctly, the winner claimed a prize.

So as we're playing along, people at the same table kept winning time after time after time. It was way more than coincidence. Nobody else was winning anything--just these same women. Eventually, I figured out that they were just calling their fabrics whatever they wanted. So a floral might be a leaf, or a dot (if it had a dot on it anywhere), or it might be a geometric if the flower wasn't exactly realistic. In other words, any one square could be a half a dozen different things. And when they went through to check it, sometimes they couldn't even remember what they had called something. So the winner might say "red leaf," and the caller would say, "No, I didn't call red leaf."

And the person would say, "Oh, how about red floral."

"No?"

"Hm, Red holiday?" And on like this until they hit on the right square. So it turns out that they were cheating!!! Can you believe that?

Once I figured this out it started bugging me when the same women would claim one, two, three, four, or more prizes during the evening while the rest of us sat idle.

Eventually one of these women came over to our table and said, "I'm going to teach you ladies how to play bingo." And I said, "I wrote on the back of my fabrics what they were so there would be no mistake and I would know what I intended each square to be."

And she replied, "Oh we just play to get acquainted and to have fun."

And I said, "Well, it's not much fun when the same people win all the time." Further, they sit together all of the time each month, so there was no "getting acquainted" about it. Sheesh.

It was ridiculous. What's the use of playing a game with no rules? And if there are no rules, doesn't it make sense to tell everyone there are no rules so that we're all on the same, uh, card?

I'm still kind of miffed about it. It's just a dumb game, and maybe I'm being petty, but this is just one more reason I don't like my guild. There are a lot of things I like, and that's why I keep going, but the people are not one of them.

By the way, we donated our fabric bingo cards at the end of the evening and they'll be made into charity quilts. It's a good idea. Too bad these women had to spoil it for everyone else with their cheating ways.