This review is for Our Lady Help's Bingo game, not the school or church services…read more
Our Lady Help runs two weekly Bingo games: Friday @ 7:30pm and Sunday @ 7pm. For our first time here, my hub'ster and I made it in on a Sunday. Here are the highlights:
** This is a large crowd. Games take place in the school building. Seating is spread across three areas: the basement (where concessions are), the stage, and a large room upstairs. All three areas have wall boards and next-number screens. We sat in the basement, which was bright and comfortable enough. Parking lots have plenty of space.
** Admission is $4 for a 3-face with all regular games. Additional regular games and specials are all sold separately. Depending on how many boards you play, you're looking at approx. $20 - $30+, pretty typical prices. Pull tabs, Queen of Hearts and two Holy Kielbasa games are all for sale here too.
** For a local church game, prizes are higher. There is a guaranteed $1000 cover-all special, a Red-White-Blue that paid out over $800, a Share The Wealth that paid over $400, a final cover-all for $300, and regular cover-alls were $100 or more. QOH is over $4K, with 12 cards left the night we went. The Bonus Ball was reset to $140, so they probably had a recent big winner there too.
** The concession stand was very well priced (I attached a pic of the menu). We tried the Sunday-night goulash special, which was $3 well spent. "With cheese" meant with nacho cheese, which was weird to me, but my husband loved it. Coffee is 75-cents with 50-cent refills. For cheap coffee, I thought it was pretty good.
** My main star deductions are due to several technical difficulties the night we played. Our next-number-screen went out for several games. The upstairs room lost their wall boards entirely for a few games. The caller mistakenly marked numbers that weren't called a couple times. He seemed under the weather, so maybe that's why. The crowd was a bit restless with all of the errors and delays. This was our only time here so far, so not a great first impression on that regard.
In summary, this Bingo game was okay. Not my favorite local game, but worth giving another shot sometime. The food was good and cheap, the board prices were pretty standard, and the guaranteed $1000-payout cover-all game is a nice opportunity I haven't seen yet at other local Bingos. So chances are we'll be back eventually.
And the big question ... did we win???
NOPE. :-(
And that's a BIG DEPRESSING NOPE because I was ONE LOUSY NUMBER away from the $1000 win! I needed G55, they called G54 and someone won the pot alone. Congrats to them, but that was surely a jagged little pill for me to swallow. And 55 is my new least favorite number.
But the life of a Bingo'er is fraught with disappointment. So I'll surely brush it off, and be back in the game soon enough. #Bingo4Life