All about the RankingBall Bingo game

We’ve talked a lot about the RBG token sale in our blog posts (you can see some of our key explainer posts here, here and here). This time, we thought you might be interested in learning more about the RankingBall game itself. After all, this is where all those RBG tokens will be spent!

So, this post will be exclusively about the Bingo game that RankingBall is built around: how to play it, and how to win.

Getting started

Participating in a contest is easy. Just head on over to the RankingBall lobby and choose a sport, or browse the listings in our featured events page.

From there, you will be presented with a page of events to join. Check the details and find an event you’re interested in playing, then select one with an entry fee you are willing to pay. There are three different levels of entry fees:

• Free: Anyone can join these just-for-fun matches. We suggest starting off with a free event for new players. Entrants have a chance of winning RankingBall Silver tokens.
• Silver: A small fee of RankingBall Silver “play money” is required to play these matches. Anyone can play these matches.
• Fiat money or RankingBall Gold: These games have real money at stake. Residents of countries in which speculative for-profit gaming is not legal can not join these events.

For the rest of this tutorial, we will use baseball as our example sport, since that’s what is currently broadcasting as of the time of this writing. For my game event, I chose to play in a free event for the May 8th Kansas City Royals vs Baltimore Orioles match.

Filling out your game card

After selecting your game type, you will be presented with a page with a Bingo grid and a list of players. There is a lot of other information on this page too, but all you really have to do is drag and drop players onto the 16 Bingo cells in whatever order you choose. It’s that easy!

If you don’t even want to do the work of selecting players, you can just click “Random” to autofill the entire Bingo grid. Go ahead and click the button as many times as you want until you get a good spread.

Select your roster

Selecting your own players is easy. The player roster can be filtered by various criteria. You can select players from the Home or Away teams via the tabs at the top of the roster, where you can also view both teams’ records.

Most game events will require you to fill in more than one Bingo card. You can see this at the top left-hand corner of the Bingo card where it says “Field No.” Just click the + sign above that to make a second card, and so on.

Once your game card is populated with a player roster, just click “Submit” and you’re done! During the game broadcast, you can watch your Bingo card get updated in real time, or you can just check in after the game to see how much you won.

Winning strategies

Of course there is more to the game than just randomly filling out a Bingo card. If you know your sport well, you can use that to your advantage to make informed decisions about which player to place in each Bingo cell to maximize your chances of winning. There is a lot of strategy potential involved in this game!

Activation points

Pay attention to the activation tabs in the corners of each cell. They look like colored triangles, and have specific meanings depending on the sport. For baseball, yellow is a “hit”, red is “an out”, cyan is “a run”, and green is “a run batted in”. When the players achieve these events in the game, these activation tabs will light up.

You score points for each instance of activation, even if the same player activates the same tab multiple times. In my example game, I got 63 activations.

Bingo!

The most obvious way to score points is to get a Bingo. If you get four of the same-colored tabs lit up in a line, you score a Bingo!

You’ll also score more or less points depending on where the line is on the Bingo card. Look at the multipliers written on the bottom and right sides of the board. Getting a diagonal Bingo will multiply the line’s score by 2.5, for example.

Playing to win

Can you game this? Of course you can. Line up players you believe will achieve the same events. In a baseball game, this is as easy as placing the top two sluggers from each team in a single line. But you’ll also want to place the lines you feel the most sure about in the bottom row, on the right side, or positioned diagonally. This can be tricky, and takes a certain degree of finesse to master.

In my example game, the Royals tromped the Orioles 15–7. I won 100 silver for scoring a single Bingo: a diagonal line (2.5 multiplier!) in which Gentry, Machado, Duda and Soler were all out. That’s right: I won because I lined up four guys who lost! How fun is that?

There is much more to the RankingBall experience beyond the small amount I touched on today. You can create your own game events, for example. And we are actively working on more and more options for the platform, such as the upcoming esports offering. Stay tuned for exciting new announcements coming soon!

For more information about RankingBall and the RBG token sale, please visit our website, drop us a line on our Telegram channel, or join our public Telegram group to chat.