When you play a game of bingo you get a lot of value out of the small stakes that you put down to play. In a game of roulette, you put your money down on a certain number, colour, or section of the roulette table. You spin the wheel and either win or lose your bet. The fun is over before it has begun. The experience is very different when you play a game of online bingo.

First off, you have to decide which game to enter. Most bingo sites such as Tidy Bingo, Buzz Bingo and Costa Bingo run games around the clock in their different bingo rooms. You can choose to pay to play for the progressive jackpots and the guaranteed jackpots or play the free games instead. At www.costabingo.com there are three whole rooms devoted to free games of bingo. These are: Freasy Peasy, Fun ‘n’ Free and Fancy Free. The free games are open to any player who’s made a deposit of their own money on the site – it’s a way of rewarding customer loyalty; we all like the idea of getting something for nothing.

When you’ve chosen a game, you can enter the bingo chat room related to the game that you’re playing. And that’s where the social side comes into it. When you play a game of bingo in a land-based bingo hall, there’s not much time for socialising; you have to be quiet during play so that you and all the other players, whether young or old, can hear the numbers being called out. Then you have to make sure that you mark those matching numbers on your card quickly and accurately so that you can shout bingo when you have crossed off all your numbers. In an online game of bingo, though, none of that is required. The auto-daub feature in the software means that you don’t even have to watch the number calls – your matching numbers will be marked for you, and if you have a winning ticket, this will be registered automatically by the game software.

Instead, you’re free to get chatting to other players in the same game in the bingo chat room. You can share the excitement of the game, passing comments on how well you’re doing with bingo lingo such as 3TG (three to go – three numbers left before you have a full house) or just chatting about life in general. As well as the other players, there’s always a chat moderator present, to make sure everyone feels included in the conversation if they want to be, and to run chat games for the roomies who are present. Chat games can lead to extra prizes – sometimes cash, sometimes free entries to future bingo games on the site.

If you hit it off with a particular player and you want to carry on your conversation in private, you can always send them a private message. There’s also the possibility of inviting existing friends to join you in playing the same games of bingo online – just let them know where you’re playing and when, and you can play the games together.

This social side of online bingo adds to the fun of playing and, for many players, it’s why they choose bingo over other types of online gambling games.