BINGO descended from an Italian game called Lo Givoco del Lotto D’Italia around 1530. A pitchman encountered a version in Germany and sensed its possibilities, bringing it to America in the 1920s as a carnival game. It was called Beano, since players marked their cards with beans. Winners shouted, “Beano!”

A struggling toy salesman from New York named Edwin S. Lowe saw the game at a carnival near Atlanta in 1929. Back home, he tested it on friends, and one winner mistakenly called out, “Bingo!” rather than “Beano!” He liked what he heard.

It was a priest in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., who recognized the game’s power to help his ailing church. Trouble was, there were just 24 unique cards at the time, so too many people were winning. The priest pressed upon Mr. Lowe the need for vaster possibilities of losing. Mr. Lowe enlisted a Columbia math professor named Carl Leffler, who configured more than 6,000 different bingo cards. All those combinations took a mighty toll.

Random number generators are now used to make bingo cards, and the number of possible cards is about half an octillion, which is a 1 followed by 27 zeros.