Big Sea Games has posted their Help file for Team Bingo.

On a related note, if you are interested in ranking up faster and earning awards faster in Team Bingo, revisit our old post about the awards and using the “Badda Method”.

For future reference, all of the How to Play pages will be linked from each game’s individual page in our Game Ranks pages. Enjoy!

For those of you who are interested in joining a league for Team Bingo or just checking them out, we’ve created a list of all Leagues for Big Sea Games with links to their web sites, information about what halls/teams they play in, and who their admins are.

In the future, if you need to find the league list, it’ll be linked from the right sidebar under “Most Popular Pages”.

In other league-related news: two leagues have decided to shut down in the past few weeks. LetsBingo and BingoWorld both have closed their doors and their members have dispersed to other leagues. League play is still strong on Big Sea Games and hopefully it’ll continue to flourish after the site is out of beta status and open to the general public!

The awards in Team Bingo are all pretty straight-forward, but I’ve found there are a few things you can do to speed up your progress in earning them. (For your reference, here’s the list of all ranks and awards for Team Bingo.)

To start, it doesn’t matter what room you play in, just choose a room letter that you need for the B I N G O award (Win a game playing in each of the 5 rooms), or just hit the Play Now button for a random room. You can start daubing right away and play this round through, the key is to pay attention once this round is over.

As soon as you can, choose new cards so that each card has a B4 on it (preferably in different spots so as to maximize your BADDA card coverage). This will help you start collecting those precious B4′s for Before You Win (Play the B4 ball 250 times).

Until you’ve earned Cinco de Bingo (Earn 5 Bingos), Patternity Suit (Earn Bingos in each of 7 different patterns), and Over the Top (Be the Bingo that ends the game with a win for your team) you may want to play normally because the method outlined in the rest of this article may not be the fastest or easieset way to achieve them. Playing “normally” in this case is daubing your cards as the balls come onto the tray and calling BINGO when you have one.

Two of the awards are simply about being in the right place at the right time: Mug Shot (Play a game using the “Mug” pattern) and Tray Chic (Spell the word BINGO in the tray). In the course of earning the most time-consuming badges you should earn these two naturally. You can play normally or use the method below, it doesn’t matter.

To earn Bonus Balls (Find 750 bonus balls), you’ll just have to play and play and play. Even if you were lucky enough to get a bonus on each card in every round, it’d still take you 250 rounds! You will make progress toward this award no matter how you play, so try the BADDA method and see if you like it!

The BADDA Method

Using this method, you will make solid progress toward the following awards by making the best use of your BADDA card and getting more jackpot spins: Phenom Annul (Move from the rank “Bingo Phenom” to “Bingo Veteran”), Badda Bling (Cover your Badda Bingo card 35 times), Lucky Spin (Receive a Jackpot Spin worth more than 2,250 tokens), and Master Card (Achieve the rank of “Bingo Master”).

From this point forward, you’ll want to focus on one thing and one thing only: filling your BADDA card. I refer to this as “The BADDA Method”. It will help you earn more jackpot spins, rank faster, and earn your remaining awards faster. While BINGOs are a nice token boost, they just don’t happen very often and cannot be relied upon to help you quickly earn ranks.

I recommend you become very comfortable with multitasking. When the round first starts, go to another window and do something else — maybe catch up on posts here and leave a comment or two — but make sure you’re listening for the first BINGO to be called. (I wrote this whole article while playing in another window using the BADDA method!)

When you hear the first bingo called (or if you’re new at this, a few minutes after the round begins), take a look at your BADDA card. If it’s blank, start marking off the numbers on the leftmost card (I like to think of it as Card 1). You don’t have to do anything other than click each individual empty spot on the card: if it’s a valid ball the game will mark it, otherwise your click will do nothing. If you’ve got a BADDA in progress, mark only the numbers that are in the same spot as a blank on your BADDA card.

Once you’ve marked all of the available spaces on Card 1, go to Card 2 and once again daub only the numbers that are in the same spot as a blank on your BADDA card. Look again at your BADDA card’s blank spots to find out what to mark for Card 3.

The key is to never mark a spot on any bingo card that has previously been marked on the BADDA card.

In the example below, I would try to daub I-17, B-15, and I-18 based on the blank spots on my BADDA card. If any of those were not daub-able, I’d move on to the next card and do the same.

If you haven’t earned a jackpot spin by filling your BADDA card (at this point you should be really close), go back to Card 1, 2 or 3 and try to fill in the blanks that correspond with blank spots on your BADDA card. I can usually get at least 2 jackpot spins per round by clearing my BADDA card. (It’s too bad a lot of spins are for under 500 tokens, though.)

Once BINGO has been called, you’ll want to try to daub all of the blank spots on the remaining cards. You’ll have to be fast with this, especially if you’ve got a lot of blank spots on your cards left. The BADDA card’s blank spots don’t matter after BINGO has been called, so just click away on every open spot on your cards. Don’t forget to call BINGO if you have it!

Sometimes you’ll find that your cards have the same number in the same spot on every card (and therefore making it harder to clear your BADDA card), just remember to switch to a new card or cards before the next round begins. (Don’t forget your B4′s if you’re working toward Before You Win!)

With this method, you will earn just as many BINGOs as someone not using this method, just not at the exact moment the last ball you need comes out of the hopper. That’s why I recommend you try to earn Over the Top by playing “normally” and holding your bingo until the room you’re in only needs one more to win, though it’s entirely possible you could earn it using the BADDA method, if your timing is right.

Good luck with your Team Bingo awards!

Brag a little! Leave a comment below letting us all know how many awards you’ve earned in Team Bingo and how this guide has helped you!

Today, Big Sea Games added three dedicated League Halls to Team Bingo and starting tomorrow they ask that all tournaments be held in these special rooms. Here’s the official notice from Draddog:

Hi everyone,

As part of the planned maintenance down time tomorrow, August 26th, (to happen at 9 AM), we will be adding three League Halls to Team Bingo. Tournament organizers (directors) should contact Mod_Hope to gain access to these halls. You can reach her by using the Contact Us page. Please make the subject “Attn: Mod_Hope-Leagues”.

These halls will be called out by name as “League Halls”. We are going to ask that all Team Bingo Leagues be played in these halls starting tomorrow.

This is just a first step for us in our support of Leagues on an ongoing basis.

Congratulations to the leagues who can once again hold tournaments like there’s no tomorrow!

What do you think of these dedicated halls? Do they allow leagues to continue in the privacy of their own rooms which will never fill up with non-league players, or do they cause leagues to lose out on possible new recruits because they are sequestered into their own rooms? What’s your take?

Heads up! The Big Sea Games site is going to be taken down for a maintenance period on August 26 at 9am PST. This one-hour maintenance period will serve to add three League halls to Team Bingo, hopefully alleviating the room overcrowding and tournaments will no longer be suspended. (See this previous post: Bingo Tournaments Suspended for more details.)

Maintenance – August 26, 2009
We will be taking Big Sea Games down tomorrow, Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 9 AM Pacific Time for one hour. We will be performing maintenance to improve overall stability for the site and games.

We also will be adding three League halls to Team Bingo. These halls are for the use of Leagues primarily and will be clearly marked as League Halls. If you are not in playing in a League event, we ask that you limit yourself to the non-league rooms. We also ask that Leagues limit themselves to the League halls as well.

Thanks itsme07 for the heads up!

Update 8/26 5:30am PST: The Community/forums went down overnight and will remain down until after scheduled maintenance. In addition, users are reporting problems getting into game rooms even though the rooms appear full and the number of people in each room seems to change from time to time. Your game window may hang just like this (what I’ve dubbed the “terminal load screen”):

This may or may not be related to today’s maintenance, but rest assured that you’re not alone if you cannot load a game; it appears to be a known issue and at the very least it’ll be resolved after maintenance ends later today.

Update 8/26 7:20am PST: And the site’s down for maintenance. (Why early? Probably because of the problems listed in my last update.) No ETA yet on its return. “Big Sea Games Big Sea Games is down a bit early. The site maintenance we are conducting today should help to address these issues. Check back for updates.”

Update 8/26 10:20am PST: ” Big Sea Games The site maintenance continues on pace. The team got a late start due to last night’s outage, but we are still hoping to be back within the hour.”

Update 8/26 11:45am PST: The main site back up and the forums should be back online soon. I haven’t yet determined whether the Farm 52 problems have been fixed (even partly) because I wasn’t one of the ones with a problem in the first place. Keep us posted, please!

Update 8/26 2:05pm PST: Ugh. “We are aware that the site is down again. We currently expect to be back up in an hour or so.”

Update 8/26 3:20pm PST: And it’s back.

Update 8/26 3:55pm PST: And it’s down.

Update 8/26 5:34pm PST: And it’s up.

The transition from Big Fish Games’ Game Community to Big Sea Games has been rough and stormy seas for a lot of people, but just when you thought things were smooth sailing again, a storm has hit the halls of Team Bingo. Tonight, MOD_Hope entered Team Bingo’s Hall 1 Room I during their Sunday night tournament and told the Let’s Bingo League that they could not hold tournaments in that room until more Halls and Rooms have been added to the site. Hope didn’t give many details — or even a reason why notice was being given on a Sunday evening — but she did say she’d get in touch with the League admins in about a week with more information. So far, not one of the nine other leagues that played on Big Fish Games’ Game Community has been notified of this suspension, though the news of what happened had spread across the community in just a few hours.

While it’s understandable that the Big Sea moderators would be concerned of room overcrowding in this beta period and the issue of perhaps not enough rooms to go around, there are fifteen rooms total and only ten leagues that had no conflict choosing a room of their own (at least as far as I know). Some people are speculating that the reason their tournaments have been suspended is because someone complained about the tournament activity going on while they were playing. (For what it’s worth, the Let’s Bingo League prides themselves on being good examples for all players and always welcoming non-league players into the room as they are hosting a tournament there.)

One of the Let’s Bingo League admins, Aggie, has written an email to Big Sea Games to convince them to reverse their decision to suspend tournaments temporarily, you can read more at the Let’s Bingo League web site.

What do you think of this? Feel free to post a comment below, and if you know any more information on the status of tournaments on Big Sea Games please keep us posted via a comment! (I am not a member of a league, so as much as I try to keep up with everything, I rely heavily on other fans like you to keep me abreast of the latest news and information.) Thanks!

When Team Bingo is upgraded along with the Community redesign (due out in August or shortly thereafter), it’ll have twelve awards you can earn:

Cinco de Bingo
Earn 5 Bingos

Phenom Annul
Move from the rank “Bingo Phenom” to “Bingo Veteran”

Patternity Suit
Earn Bingos in each of 7 different patterns

Badda Bling
Cover your Badda Bingo card 35 times

Lucky Spin
Receive a Jackpot Spin worth more than 2,250 tokens

Master Card
Achieve the rank of “Bingo Master”

B I N G O
Win a game playing in each of the 5 rooms

Over the Top
Be the Bingo that ends the game with a win for your team

Before You Win
Playing the B4 ball 250 times

Tray Chic
Spell the word BINGO in the tray

Bonus Balls
Find 750 bonus balls

Mug Shot
Play a game using the “Mug” pattern

A whole bunch of games are getting ‘awards’, which are in-game achievements you can earn and show off in your awards album. To see all of the awards you’ll be able to earn when the community redesign is launched, check out our Game Awards page.

Team Bingo is getting an update when the new Community Games site is launched in July or August. Take a look at these screenshots:

The gameplay remains the same as the original — hopefully this redesign will breathe new life into this fun bingo game when it’s released!