How to create a bingo card customers will actually play

Company instructions for fulfilling BingoAI gift cards and classic BasicBingo requests: interviews, descriptions, social paste, chat logs, and photos, turned into print-ready cards. Use with the app at / or produce offline when needed.

Mission Deliver warm, specific, playable bingo cards — light roast, never mean. Every square should be observable in a real evening with friends or family. Prefer concrete habits over vague personality adjectives.

1. Intake: what the user gave us

Classify the request before generating squares.

Source	What to extract	Risks
Free description	Names, relationship, setting (wedding, office, trip), must-include jokes	Too vague → invent plausible tropes, then mark for review
Pasted homepage / LinkedIn / Facebook	Job, hobbies, catchphrases, travel, pets, volunteer work, recurring posts	Don’t use private contact data; avoid medical or legal sensitive content
Chat logs (.txt, exports)	Repeated memes, emoji habits, inside jokes, who always cancels plans	Strip phone numbers, addresses, credentials if present
Images / screenshots	Captions, group dynamics, outfits, locations, pets, food culture	Vision OCR can misread — verify funny names before print
PDF / notes	Event schedule, speech themes, company culture deck phrases	Corporate jargon bingo is great; HR-sensitive content is not

Privacy rule Never print or store payment data, government IDs, health details, or passwords found in uploads. If found, delete the upload text and continue with non-sensitive signals only.

2. Choose board size & free space

Size	Cells (w/ FREE)	Best for
3×3	8 + FREE	Kids tables, short events, icebreakers
4×4	16 (no natural center FREE unless forced off)	Quick parties, dinner games
5×5 Classic	24 + FREE	Larger gift card, weddings, family reunions, offices
6×6	36	Long events, conferences, “hard mode”
7×7 Epic	48 + FREE	All-day festivals; expect smaller type on print

FREE center: enable for odd sizes, including 3×3, 5×5, and 7×7. The toggle keeps the other squares in place. Players start with the center marked. Turn it off when every square should be a real line.

Gift cards default to 3×3. That default is the single value GIFT_DEFAULT_SIZE in config.js. Set it to 5 when a classic gift board should open first.

2b. Gift cards

The Gift tab is the product. The buyer names a recipient and an occasion (birthday, Christmas, retirement, party, team, couple, pet), picks a tone, and answers who the card is about. Each later question depends on the earlier answers. A dad and a product launch do not get the same interview. The wizard stores the session in SQLite and stops at seven steps. Skip ahead / generate now is on every step.

Tone	How squares should sound
Warm	A toast. Specific and kind.
Fond-mean	A roast from someone who loves them. Never cruel, never about protected traits.
Professional	Safe to read at work. Still particular to that team or launch.
Chaotic	Party energy. Short, and still about this subject.

Print check The occasion and “For {name}” sit in the title area. Print one page before you call it done. Lock any square that is already right — shuffle and rewrite leave locked squares alone. Click a square to edit it in place. There is no Stripe checkout yet; cards.order_id is reserved for the later shop.

2c. Interview, rant, and delivery

Every wizard step has multi-select chips and an Other box. Both go to the model before the next question. The interview still stops at seven steps, and Skip ahead / generate now is on every step.

A voice rant can be recorded in the browser or uploaded. With XAI_API_KEY, xAI speech-to-text fills the transcript and Grok pulls points. Without a key, audio is stored and the buyer types the transcript; a typed rant still gets local points. Show that transcript and the points, and let them edit, before the card is generated.

Get this card is the checkout. Prices: PDF €6.99, print it yourself €6.99 (300gsm card stock), party set €14.99, printed card €16.99 shipped to the EU, UK, or US. Stripe is not connected. Pay now is a placeholder. Skip payment (dev) does not charge. Printed orders are stored only — no printer API. Acrylic and wood keepsakes are coming soon.

2d. Twelve cards for a party

On a finished card, Create 12 similar starts a party printout. The buyer pays before the 12-card preview. Stripe is not connected: Pay now is a placeholder, and Skip payment (dev) unlocks the preview without a charge.

The twelve cards share the person, occasion, and tone. Positions are shuffled and some squares are swapped for extras from one Grok batch, or from the local mixer when no API key is set. Keep the roast to about 40% of a card. No sexual content.

Click a square — Not at all (drop that line and related lines), Similar, or Tune.
Tune — four suggestions in a 2×2 grid, plus a box for a new square or a short note.
Double-click — edit that square’s words on the card.
Print / Save PDF — two cards per Letter/A4 page for 3×3, one per page for 5×5.

3. Square-writing standards

Good squares

Observable: “Mentions their podcast within 10 minutes”
Short: 2–8 words so they fit the cell at print size
Specific: “Brings homemade baklava” beats “Is generous”
Varied energy: mix mild, chaotic, and sweet beats
Playable by guests: outsiders should understand the joke with one glance

Avoid

Insults about body, identity, trauma, or protected characteristics
Anything that could humiliate the subject in front of kids or colleagues
Full sentences, hashtags, or @handles that clutter print
Duplicates or same joke pattern (“X does Y” twelve times)
Unverifiable gossip or workplace-legal landmines

Tone bar If you wouldn’t read the square aloud to the subject’s favorite aunt, rewrite it. Funny roast ≠ mean roast.

4. End-to-end workflow (app)

Open the app. The badge shows Grok ready when XAI_API_KEY is set. Without a key the server still drafts a card and the badge says Local fallback.
For a gift, use the Gift tab: recipient, occasion, tone, then the wizard. Otherwise pick size (3×3 through 7×7), FREE center, and theme.
Fill at least one input path:
- Describe — narrative brief
- Paste text — social / homepage copy
- Upload — images, PDFs, chat logs
- Chat — iterative refinement with Grok
Click Generate with Grok. Review every square on the board.
Edit any square in place (click). Lock a keeper so shuffle and rewrite leave it. Double-click to test-mark. Shuffle only moves unlocked squares.
Use Chat: “make it milder”, “more dog jokes”, “less office, more family”, “shorter phrases”.
Save to SQLite, then Print or export via browser PDF.

5. Manual / offline fallback

When AI is unavailable or the customer wants full human craft:

Highlight 8–12 quirks from the brief on paper.
Write 1.5× the squares you need, then cut the weakest.
Click Start blank in the app and type cells by hand.
Title format: Name’s [Event] Bingo or [Theme] Bingo.

6. Quality checklist (before handoff)

Correct size and FREE center setting
Title spelled correctly (customer-facing names double-checked)
No duplicate or near-duplicate squares
No private data (phones, addresses, salaries, medical)
Every square readable at arm’s length on a printed page
Tone appropriate for the audience (kids vs. open bar vs. boardroom)
At least 3 “easy” squares so first-timers get a win early
At least 2 “legendary” squares that might never happen (bragging rights)
Print preview checked (headers/footers off in browser if needed)

7. Printing methods

A. Browser print (default)

App → Print. Use Chrome or Edge for best CSS print. Set margins to Default or Minimum, enable background graphics if you want theme colors (Classic cream is safest for ink).

B. Save as PDF

Print → Destination: Save as PDF. Name file bingo-[name]-[size].pdf. Good for email delivery and print shops.

C. Home / office printer

Paper: 80–100 gsm white or cream A4 / Letter. Color optional. For thick card stock (160–200 gsm), print one card per sheet, then trim with a paper cutter.

D. Print shop / copies

Export PDF, order color laser on light card stock. For events, print 10–20% extra. Optional laminate for reuse with dry-erase markers (leave FREE center unlaminated edge for punch holes if binding).

Event packing tip Bundle: printed cards + cheap pens or stickers for marks + one host card with answer key notes (optional). For large groups, shuffle squares differently per card only if the host wants competitive variety — usually same card for everyone is easier to call.

Print layout notes

The app print stylesheet hides UI chrome and keeps the grid square. Prefer portrait Letter or A4.
7×7 needs larger paper or accept smaller type; test one page first.
Neon theme uses dark backgrounds — great on screen, heavy on ink. Prefer Classic or Forest for bulk printing.
For multi-card sheets (2-up): export PDF and use a PDF booklet tool, or reduce scale to 50% in the print dialog (quality varies).

8. Hosting the game (customer advice)

Explain the win condition: line, four corners, full card, or blackout.
Agree who is “fair game” to observe — usually one guest of honor or the whole room.
Keep rounds 20–45 minutes; longer events use larger boards or blackout.
Prizes: silly > expensive. Think crown, mug, chore pass, first dessert.
If something sensitive comes up mid-game, host can veto a square out loud.

9. AI prompt patterns that work

When chatting with Grok in-app, operators can paste patterns like:

“Rewrite all squares under 5 words.”
“Make it office-safe for a mixed-age holiday party.”
“Lean into travel and food; drop dating jokes.”
“Keep the title; replace the weakest 8 squares only.”
“Same energy as current card but for her twin brother.”

10. Data & ops notes

Cards and chat history live in local SQLite: data/bingo.db.
Uploads land in uploads/ — purge on a schedule if handling customer data.
API key: server-side only via XAI_API_KEY (SpaceXAI / xAI). Never ship the key to the browser.
Model default: grok-4.5 (override with XAI_MODEL).
Health check: GET /api/health.

11. Escalation

Issue	Action
AI returns mean / off-brand squares	Chat-refine with tone constraint; if still bad, manual rewrite and note incident
Vision extract garbage	Ask customer for text paste; don’t invent from bad OCR names
No API key / rate limit	Missing key: the app drafts locally and says so. Rate limit or a bad key: fix `.env` and retry. Blank cards still work offline.
Customer unhappy with roast level	Offer milder regen free; document preferred tone on the card notes field

One-line definition of done A saved, print-previewed card where every square is short, kind-funny, specific to the brief, and readable on paper — ready for the event bag.