With everyone connected to everyone and all the information you could possibly need just a few taps away, it seems odd that a creation that’s been popular for well over a century wouldn’t have made it around the world. Throw in the fact that Britain is a major consumer market that’s forever craving something new to buy and try, and such a situation becomes all the more bizarre.
Now, however, a game that’ll be 140 years old next year is suddenly becoming the talk of the town. So, what’s introduced this Don Clemente Lotería to the masses, and what’s it all about?
The Team Up that Brought Lotería to the Brits
Source: Unsplash
Before we delve into exactly what Don Clemente Lotería is, we should see how it came to become a trending topic in the UK. It didn’t land in its original form and instead gained traction through collaboration. Perhaps the most striking of the slingo bingo selection, Slingo Lotería looks iconic even without knowing what the theme is in the game.
Jumping into the slot-bingo combination game, you get a horizontal reel of symbols at the base and then a grid loaded with symbols. The symbols are the cards of Don Clemente Lotería, with you needing to match them on the same reel column as on the bingo grid. As you go, you’ll place pinto beans where you hit the cards, make more bingo lines, and climb the prize ladder.
The game goes all-in on making it a distinctly Don Clemente Loteríá experience, from the flutes and shakers in the soundtrack to the visuals. While there are jackpots of up to 5,000x to be won, the big card players want to land is the El Comodín, which is essentially your wild card. When it spins in, you get to tick off any symbol in the above column. It plays very well as a variant of slingo, and when you know more about Lotería, it’s easy to see why.
A Classic Game Dating back to 1887
Source: Pixabay
It’s said that Don Clemente Lotería dates back to a French businessman setting up a paper and canned goods business all the way over in Mexico. From there, a set of playing cards was produced, creating the game of Lotería, which is now becoming of great interest to Britain’s online entertainment seekers.
One of the reasons why Lotería fits so well with the slingo formula is that it’s a kind of bingo game itself. In the 54-card set, you’ll find 54 unique images, which you’ll use to play off of a 4×4 grid of images that match those cards. As the cards are drawn from the deck and revealed, the players mark them as matched with pinto beans.
Everyone’s playing to complete lines, the corners, or to get a full house, and the first one there wins. At this point, the winner will declare “Lotería!” So, as you can see, this is just a card-based version of bingo, which arguably makes it more home-friendly, due to the lack of need for a ball cage and 80-odd numbered balls.
Later, Calendarios y Pasatiempos S.A. de C.V. acquired the rights to the 1887-made game in the 1980s, creating a way of licensing out the game and letting it spread around the world. Even as recently as the end of last year, a company known to many in the UK, Asmodee, picked up distribution rights for the classic card game.
So, a game made some 140 years ago by a Frenchman in Mexico has now landed in the UK, courtesy of a natural collaboration with slingo. So now, Brits can experience an immersive take on Don Clemente Lotería online.
