For those that haven’t played yet, here’s what all fifty-four of the traditional Loteria cards look like, courtesy of the classic set produced by Don Clemente / Pasatiempos Gallo.
Many of you have played Loteria with me at large assemblies and featured events when I make my convention road appearances - some of you for the first time ever –and the energy from those games is fantastic and contagious. All of those old-school cards are packed with memory and nostalgia. She would pick a few random cards, show them to me, turn them over and then I’d have to remember which cards were where. My grandma used Loteria cards to play concentration games.
Curanderas (fortune tellers) use them as a personal ‘tarot’ to tell fortunes. Bingo is played with random selections of letters and numbers, but with Loteria, it’s the shuffle of a fifty-four card picture deck that creates the agony and the ecstasy. If you know how to play traditional Bingo, then you know how to play the game. When I was a kid, I played Loteria (AKA ‘Mexican Bingo’) with my family.
