Human bingo · free generator
Human bingo cards for your next meetup
Pick a preset or paste your own 24 prompts, set how many people are coming, print. Every card is shuffled differently, the centre is free. No email, no signup.
How to run human bingo at a meetup
- Hand the card out at the door, with a pen, together with the name tag. A card handed out after the talks lands in a bag.
- Say the rule from the stage in one sentence. "Find a person who matches a square, write their name in, one name per card, five in a row, the draw is at nine." Few people read the footer.
- One name per card. This is the whole game. Without it the two most sociable guests fill each other's card in three minutes.
- Prompts about real work, not hobbies. "Has done a reorg this year" starts a ten-minute conversation between two engineering managers. "Likes pizza" starts nothing.
- Fix the draw time and keep it. 20 to 30 minutes into the networking block, cards go to the bar, one winner is drawn, the prize is status or access. A ticket to the next event with a guest pass, a 1:1 with a speaker, a front-row seat with the winner's name on it.
The ELC variant: first-timer bingo
At ELC meetups the card is for first-timers only. Instead of 24 prompts it carries the names of four to six regulars from the "People to Meet" slide, the same faces first-timers saw in the email three days before. A first-timer who introduces themselves to five of them wins a ticket to the next meetup plus a guest pass, drawn about an hour into the networking block. It is one of the reasons first-timers come back. The full-room version above is what we run at company events, where nobody knows anybody yet.
72 human bingo prompts, three presets
The same lists the generator loads. Copy the ones that fit your room, replace the rest with facts only your crowd would know.
Tech meetup
- Has shipped an AI agent to production
- Manages more than 20 people
- Was paged after midnight this month
- Works at a company with fewer than 50 engineers
- Hired someone in the last 30 days
- Is at this meetup for the first time
- Deleted more code than they wrote this year
- Runs a monorepo
- Migrated onto or off Kubernetes in the last year
- Is a manager who still writes code every week
- Has given a conference talk
- Has founded a company
- Let someone go this year
- Has a team in more than one country
- Came here by bike
- Has read more than 5 books on management
- Has a side project that earns money
- Said no to a VP this week
- Speaks three languages
- Uses an AI coding assistant every day
- Has only ever worked at companies under 500 people
- Has more than 10 years in tech
- Has a 1:1 scheduled for tomorrow morning
- Went from engineer to manager and back
Engineering leaders
- Runs more than 5 teams
- Reports to the CEO
- Did a reorg in the last 12 months
- Cut a project they loved
- Promoted a manager from within this year
- Has an AI adoption target from the board
- Has run a hiring freeze
- Has interviewed more than 50 candidates
- Has a staff engineer track people use
- Runs 1:1s every two weeks, not weekly
- Tried a four-day week with a team
- Has presented to the board
- Has been through an acquisition
- Has closed an office
- Mentored someone who is now a CTO
- Owns a budget over one million a year
- Wrote the company engineering values
- Has hired a Head of AI
- Replaced a tool the whole team hated
- Lost a key engineer to a competitor this year
- Is on the on-call rotation
- Said "I don't know" to their team this week
- Stayed at one company from series A to exit
- Coached someone through a burnout
Internal company event
- Joined in the last 90 days
- Has been here more than 5 years
- Sits on a different floor than you
- Has fixed a bug in code you wrote
- Is in a team you have never had a meeting with
- Was on call this week
- Has a customer name in their Slack status
- Shipped something this week
- Moved teams internally
- Knows what the company's first product was
- Has a desk plant that is still alive
- Has never met their manager in person
- Wrote an RFC this quarter
- Merged more than 100 pull requests this year
- Speaks a language nobody else on their team speaks
- Has presented at an all-hands
- Has a hobby that involves a blade
- Has used our product as a customer
- Reviewed code for a team not their own
- Is a manager who still codes
- Was interviewed by someone in this room
- Took parental leave here
- Runs a Slack channel that is not about work
- Flew to another office this year
Get the next game before your next meetup.
New networking games and the ELC meetup checklist land in the Leaders' Brief, the monthly email 1,500+ engineering leaders open every issue.
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A welcome email is on its way. The next games come with the next Leaders' Brief.
For companies
Want ELC to run the whole night at your office?
Your venue, your speaker. The ELC team brings the topic, the audience of 3,300+ engineering leaders, the games, the host and the photos. A median of 125 confirmed registrations across the last 13 public meetups.
See what ELC runs for companiesQuestions people ask
What is human bingo?
A networking game on a 5x5 card. Every square is a fact about a person ("has given a conference talk"). You walk around, find someone who matches a square, and write their name in it. One name per card. Five in a row wins. Also called networking bingo, people bingo or icebreaker bingo.
How many prompts do I need?
24. A 5x5 card has 25 squares and the middle one is free. With more than 24 prompts the generator picks a different 24 for each card, which makes the cards harder to copy from a neighbour.
How long does a human bingo round take at a meetup?
20 to 30 minutes for a room of 50 to 150. Announce the draw time from the stage, collect the cards at the bar, draw one winner. Without a fixed draw time the game fades out after ten minutes.
What is a good prize for human bingo?
Status or access, not swag. At ELC the first-timer who meets five named people wins a ticket to the next meetup plus a guest pass. A 1:1 with a speaker or a front-row seat with your name on it works for a senior crowd. A branded pen does not.
Can I print the cards from this page?
Yes. Generate the cards, press Print, and the print view shows one card per page with nothing else from the site. Works with "Save as PDF" in the print dialog too. No email, no signup.
How is this different from the free-centre bingo I know from parties?
Same card, different squares. Party bingo has numbers, human bingo has people. The centre stays FREE so a card can be completed with four matches in a row through the middle, which keeps the first ten minutes fast.