Board game:The Little Botanist: A Game for Children

The game of Bingo can be traced back to a lottery game called "Lo Giuoco Code Loto," played in Italy in 1530. By the 1700s you could find bingo maturing in France where they used playing cards, tokens, and added the reading out of numbers. The 1800s saw bingo widely used in Germany for educational purposes, to teach children spelling, animal names, and multiplication tables. The game Lotto is essentially an American version for children, produced by McLoughlin Brothers, and others, in the late 19th century. These games involved not only numbers, but spelling and picture matching as well (as in this example.) When the game "Beano" showed up at county fairs in the 1920s in America, which led to the introduction of Bingo as we know it today, it was no doubt based on these late 19th-century Lotto games. This version has pictures of plants, for identification.