Zynga Brings Social Gaming To The Bingo Hall With Newest Title

There’s been one trend we’ve been noticing over the past few years when it comes to Zynga’s game development strategy. The social gaming giant likes to re-create classic games like Hangman or hidden puzzles and add social elements for gameplay. We saw this with the release of Hanging With Friends, Scramble With Friends, Hidden Chronicles. And As Zynga revealed in October, next up is Bingo. Today, the company is revealing its social take on Bingo via a Facebook game, which will be joining Zynga Poker in Zynga’s newest franchise, Zynga Casino. Currently, the game is in private beta but will be launching to the public soon.
In terms of actual gameplay, Zynga Bingo works similarly to the way an ordinary bingo game works. And if you’ve played Zynga Poker before, the game mechanics and nuances will feel familiar to you as well. As numbers are called out in the game, you cross off those that match on your card, with the winner being the first person who reaches a consecutive pattern on the card from the drawn numbers.
The main difference is the social aspect of Zynga Bingo. When you start the game, you’ll be promoted to enter themed bingo rooms and compete against friends or other random players on Facebook simultaneously, challenging buddies in a race to get B-I-N-G-O faster. Similar to Zynga Poker, players can chat and see which rooms their friends are in.
Each room has a theme. There’s Vegas Lights, which has a Las Vegas Casino theme; Pirate’s Paradise; and a FarmVille-themed Bounty room. And as you collect more tickets from wins, you’ll be able to unlock secret rooms as well.
As you are considering which room to enter, you can also choose how many Bingo cards you’d like to play. Players can compete with up to six cards at once, and you use your tickets to purchase more cards.
Within the game, you can also use what Zynga calls “power-ups” to progress faster, get coins and win collectibles to level-up. One type of power-up relates to friend help, which enabled a friend to automatically daubs a free square on each of your cards and complete your cards faster.
Nicole Opas, Senior Producer for Zynga Bingo, says the gaming company will be considering extending Zynga Bingo to mobile platforms in the future. Zynga Bingo was created by Zynga’s Austin, Texas gaming studio in collaboration with the Zynga Casino team in San Francisco.
It should be interesting to see how the slew of games released in the fourth quarter helped boost both Zynga’s revenue and usership numbers. The company is expected to deliver Q4 earnings on February 14, and Zynga’s stock rating just got a boost, and could see a traffic boost from some of the newly launches game titles.




Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/26/zynga-brings-social-gaming-to-the-bingo-hall-with-newest-facebook-title/