Getting To Know You - BarCamp Bingo Generator
barcamp unconference · 3 comments · 350 words
At last month's BarCamp London 13 I ran a little experiment that I'd been meaning to do for a while.
"Getting To Know You" bingo is a well-established team-building exercise. Usually, you gather a bunch of interesting personal facts from a team, stick them on a bingo card, then have people wandering around trying to find out who once dated a Spice Girl and which mid-level executive has a cat called Mr Tiddles.
At this unconference there wasn't a good way to poll attendees in advance. And, even if there was, it's hard to guarantee who will show up. So I purloined a bunch of questions from random websites, added my own, and wrote some code to generate random bingo cards.
Here's what they looked like: 
The questions
Some of the questions are the sort that you'd find in any getting-to-know-you game.
For example, find someone who:
- Has a cat
- Doesn't drink coffee
- Read more than 12 books this year
Others are slightly more ambiguous:
- Likes Taylor Swift as much as you
- Has a cool scar
- Knows the meaning of life the universe & everything
Some are deliberately difficult:
- Has the same birthday as you
- Whose dad has the same name as your dad
- Doesn't run Linux on their computer
And some are designed to get people to be creative:
- Can use The Force
- Won over £1 million on the lottery
- Has seen Bigfoot in person
Isn't that a bit annoying / confusing?
Well, yes. But it depends on the participants. Some people got extremely creative with their answers. Some, no doubt, lied. Others got extremely rules-lawyery and wanted to know how we were determining if the scar was cool or not.
And some people threw their papers away and decided not to play.
Get The Code
It's a dead-simple Python script which reads a text file of your questions and spits out as many cards as you want in one printable PDF.
That was one of our favourites for Service Jam and Gov Jam. We knew some of the people and then added some demographic appropriate ones
@Edent I never thought that knowing someone called Bigfoot would come in so handy.
@Edent I enjoyed the Bingo a lot (and was surprised at people's creativity in finding answers to the impossible) but interestingly it was the basic questions that actually led to the best conversations for me. The ones about siblings, countries people had lived in, things they knew about and obviously what dinosaurs they liked.
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