Zynga Unveils Massive Bingo for Facebook

Game-maker Zynga is launching a new way to connect and play with your friends on Facebook, with a mass participation Bingo game. The game is being release on Thursday in beta to a small group and gradually rolled out to millions on Facebook in the next few weeks.

The game is visually beautiful and the community aspect is designed to make you feel like you’re stepping into a Bingo parlor. Players can earn coins, cards and keys to move up levels and unlock rooms within the game. The rooms include “Vegas Lights,” “FarmVille Bounty,” and “Pirates Paradise.” More rooms will be added in the near future.

To keep things moving, you can play up to six Bingo cards at one time. There’s no limit to how many people you can play against. Friends can offer you some help even when they’re not signed in, by giving you tiles on the “friends boost meter,” and their Facebook profile picture will substitute as a Bingo chip on your board — getting you one step closer to shouting, “Bingo!”

Zynga Bingo was created by a team led by Senior Producer Nicole Opas, who is also responsible for one of Zynga‘s first games: Zynga Poker — with more than 30 million players monthly.

They wanted to build off the fun of that game, she said.

This new game is filled with “bingo lingo” — words like “daub,” which means to stamp your bingo card, or in this online version, cover it up with a glimmering tile.

If you land in first, second or third place, your picture and name gets posted to the leader board. You can also share your score on Facebook and if friends congratulate you, they get a Zynga Bingo reward.

The game was announced last October at Unleashed. Zynga is the maker of popular games such as Farmville, CityVille and Words with Friends. Conference Call Bingo was announced about two years ago. It’s a zany game where you cover the Bingo spaces when someone on the call says a word like “leverage” or phrase such as “At the end of the day.” But that game didn’t have Facebook’s power behind it.

Opas said they are always working on a new game at Zynga but wouldn’t give any specific details.