I'm talking about the game with the little spinning cage of balls and the cards with the letter-number combinations on them. Each player has a card, the person running the game picks a ball at random from the cage and calls it out, and if the player has that combination on their card, they cover it. Five covered squares in a row on a card is a winner.

The one virtue of any game that is purely random and based entirely on the luck of the draw is egalitarian, but that's a shallow virtue to teach anyone to accept. Why sit back and wait for fortune to smile on you? In playing Bingo, there's little else you can do but sit on your hands and wait for luck to pay you off.

That's no way to embrace a game, and it's no way to embrace life. Checkers might be a game of only two people, but at least it requires mental effort and strategy. Next time someone asks you to play Bingo, refuse. Then go buy a board game that gives you some measure of control over how well you perform at it.