Fourth of July scavenger hunt BINGO

Happy early Fourth of July! I have the feeling that June is just going to fly by.

For the grand old Independence Day this year, I wanted to do something new and fun. So I created a kind of Fourth-of-July-scavenger-hunt-BINGO-game-of fun. 😉 Yay!

Now let me explain how to use all of these free printables. First there’s the BINGO boards. I made 10 of them, all unique, so you can play with up to 10 players. Well, for classic BINGO, everyone does need a unique board. But for this new scavenger hunt BINGO, I don’t think duplicate boards should be as much of a problem, so I think you could play with 20 or 30 or…well, you get the idea.

So print off your BINGO boards and make sure each player has one. Now a typical BINGO game would work with someone randomly drawing one of the items on the board and showing it or reading it aloud. If you have that square on your board, you mark it off (or put a special-edition-pack-of-red-white-and-blue-M&Ms piece on it, hehe). When you get 5 squares marked off in a row, either diagonal, horizontal, or vertical, you yell “BINGO!” and you win the game.

You can certainly play this game that way. But I wanted to add a twist; enter scavenger hunt BINGO.

For this twist, you need larger printed versions of each picture on the BINGO board:

Print and cut these pictures out and then hide them all over your playing area. This could be in a house, in a workplace, at a family reunion, all over a park – as big or small an area as you want. And you can hide these as hidden or exposed as you want to, depending on the age of your players. You might tape them to walls or the ceiling or place them on the fridge or in potted plants. You might tape them to the inside of cupboards or inside drawers. Get creative!

Now players are free to roam the playing area and mark off pictures as they see them. From then, the same BINGO rules apply. You could have a home base station where the facilitator of the game waits for winners to run back with completed cards. Then you could give out prizes to the first few winners.

I’m thinking this game could either be played all at once, kind of like a race type scavenger hunt, or throughout the duration of a party, a workday, or even a family reunion, played more casually. The game could even last more than a day if you hide your cards really well. (I might suggest laminating the hidden pictures for better durability or longevity.)

The one rule is players cannot move, hide, or tamper with the hidden pictures in any way; they need to be there so future players will be able to find them and mark them off. (But you could suspend that rule and make it more cutthroat, wua-ha-ha-ha.)

I’ve never played this so I’m anxious to see how it goes! I think it would be ideal for a fun Fourth of July get-together or the last day of work before the holiday. Just a great way to celebrate America! Oh, and these BINGO board pictures aren’t just fireworks and hot dogs (though there are those). They’re legit, with pictures like Common Sense, a crate of tea, and the Declaration of Independence, to remind you of the forming-a-more-perfect-union part of our great American past. 🙂

Finally, I made a version of the pictures that’s slightly smaller if that would come in handy for you.

And that’s it! I hope you enjoy! Leave a comment with questions if you have them, and if you play, let me know how it goes! Happy Fourth!