Panel Action Bingo (Game Boy)

Bingo is a game of chance where the appeal comes less from the game’s actual design and more the opportunity for winning a prize or simply having a passive activity to engage with while socializing. Adapting Bingo into a video game would lead to it struggling to capture these concepts, and if they aren’t present then you are left with a very dull waiting game with little to keep you playing. This is why Panel Action Bingo decided to shake up the way you play Bingo, the game not only having you claim spots on the bingo card by moving a character around its surface, but it completely removes the wait, success now a race to claim a Bingo before the opponent can on the same card.

Panel Action Bingo has you playing as a bird who is competing with a cat in a twist on traditional Bingo play. During a round of play, a card will appear that is 5 spaces wide and 5 spaces tall, each of the panels labelled with a number from 1 to 25 until certain special panels enter the picture later down the line. As soon as the action kicks off so to does a race to claim the numbers in sequential order, marking them with your symbol if you are the first one to reach it and press A. The number placement seems somewhat random and as such things do mostly kick off as a competition to reach the right spaces first, but since spaces need to be claimed in number order, some strategy can enter the picture. Play won’t continue until the current spot of interest is claimed, so if you park your character on the spot and wait, you can have some time to survey the number placement on the board. It can be wise to sacrifice certain spots in order to grab others as a round of play ends when someone has made a full line of five claimed spots horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, but if every spot is claimed and no Bingos are made, instead the player with the most claimed spaces wins the round, meaning that the hope of a win isn’t lost if the opponent claims too many pivotal places.

In later levels of the player vs. AI battles new panels will be introduced to make navigating the board a bit more interesting. White starbursts will turn certain panels into impenetrable barriers, the bird and cat needing to work their way around them and making the process of grabbing panels a bit more than a straightforward matter of dashing towards the next available space. To make things even more dangerous though are the black hole panels that can be entered but lead to an immediate death. The single player adventure has a set of lives you need to maintain although there are passwords to jump in at certain parts if you can get far enough. Losing any round will also lead to a loss of a life, so there are stakes involved in being quick to identify the next number and safely move to it before the cat can.

When starting the single player mode though, things get off to a rather slow start. Every level of the game’s sixty actually consists of three rounds of Bingo as well as a bonus stage that grows a bit repetitive as it keeps reappearing. The bonus round has you try to bop moles that pop out of the ground before the cat to earn points towards a high score without any consequences for doing poorly, but those three rounds of regular play before it can stretch out the experience a fair bit, especially since it’s not a best of three situation but instead the game requiring a win in each of the rounds to proceed. Early on though this won’t be an issue as the cat’s AI barely compels it to move, but conversely as you get much deeper into the game the cat’s intelligence skyrockets to the point you’ll need to do a lot more spot camping and careful claiming to have a hope of overcoming its ability to immediately identify where it needs to be and dashing there in a hurry. Luckily between these extremes are a fair amount of levels where things can be challenging without the cat being too easy or difficult to defeat, and there are some ideas at play to ensure you won’t spend too long against the all-too-intelligent AI settings.

Every ten levels you’ll see a picture of some character, the first look having some of the picture blocked off until eventually the full image is shown. The relevancy of them is questionable as they appear to be anime women, although the last image in the game at least seems to suggest some connection between the cat and bird that are competing in an odd form of Bingo. The first image revealed in full will be at the 30 level mark and also signal a shift in the way the game is played. While the initial design of Panel Action Bingo is to have you start by trying to claim the spot marked 1 and going all the way up to 25 if necessary, the back half of the game inverts this and has you start with 25 and count down to 1. The inclusion of special panels like the starbursts and black holes can instead mean things start with numbers like 24 or 23, but the more important element of this shift is the AI cools down as well. The player is given time to acclimate to the new approach before the cat steps up its game and you end up with even more stages where the cat hits that difficulty sweet spot again at the cost of a few more where it leans too hard towards being easy or incredibly competent.

There are a few settings or modes to change how Panel Action Bingo is played though, although some only tilt things even more in the cat’s favor. Enabling the Hide option has certain spaces presented as completely blank until you stand on them and Break D completely hides the numbers on every panel, the player having to learn their placement through experimentation while the cat will always know where the next spot in the sequence is without needing to do such tests. This can make those early levels a bit more challenging, but it practically guarantees the cat a win when it starts becoming too capable to keep up. Ice Stage is a bit more neutral in that the usual tile-based movement of the cat and bird is now made slippery so your actual movement becomes a bit more of a factor than simply pressing the right directions faster than your opponent, but Second 3 is perhaps the most interesting complication. Second 3 prevents players sitting on any one space for more than 3 seconds, which is good because there is literally no other way to force someone off if they settle down on the next panel in sequence. This does still provide enough time for some invaluable space scouting if needed but also means gameplay can’t be completely stalled if the cat is being belligerent and trying to camp a nice cluster of numbers and waiting for you to claim the number it needs to get a good sweep going.

Multiplayer exists and the settings can instead lead to a fair tilt in modes like Hide and Break D since you both have the same disadvantages and Second 3 can put a stop to any stubborn time wasting as well. Interestingly enough one of the worse options for both single player and multiplayer though is to play with letters instead of numbers. Seemingly a simple switch on the surface as you now claim them alphabetically in sequence with the same sequence flip at stage 30, you’ll first realize that since the board is 25 spaces it will have to leave out a letter to make it fit. Rather than picking a consistent choice or shearing off Z though, the missing letter each round is unique, the disruption of needing to figure it out again something the cat has no issue with. Introduce some starburst and black hole spaces to this board style though and the missing letters become even more arbitrary and difficult to figure out, and while you might think sitting on a letter to scout can help, the cat might be able to get quite a streak going before you even can identify and reach an early letter to slow things down enough you can figure out what’s missing. A human opponent at least would face the same issues, but the AI’s advantages are too great in this mode due to the unusual approach to leaving out letters without the cat having any sort of simulated confusion to match the player’s own.

THE VERDICT: When the right difficulty balance is achieved, Panel Action Bingo is a fast-paced contest to snag spots on a board to claim Bingos or upset your opponent’s plans. The cat you compete against does have moments where it’s AI is too simple to put up a fight or too intelligent to really have much of a hope against, especially since some modes of play inherently favor it due to odd choices in board design or the way special options like hiding a panel’s number only impact human players. Multiplayer can benefit more from such adjustments though and revive some of the quick excitement that play against the AI cat can’t always hit, but despite the extremes of Panel Action Bingo being too much or too little, there’s still enough to its more abundant moments of success that it’s not a complete write-off.

And so, I give Panel Action Bingo for Game Boy…

An OKAY rating. Simulating human behavior with an AI is no easy feat and keeping the cat competitive with the player without feeling unfair was always going to be a balancing act, but Panel Action Bingo did drop the ball some when it decided that the options would only impact the player. If the cat had to confirm what numbers or letters are on hidden spots as well it would at least be possible to keep up with it in the harder levels, but Panel Action Bingo does still give a few interesting options for experimenting with if you play with another human and the AI cat does have more moments of interesting challenge to overcome than it does levels where it unfairly has the advantage. The alphabet mode really should have picked a consistent set of characters to prevent unnecessary confusion in a game that often necessitates very quick movement to grab a spot, and something like the Second 3 rule should be part of the core experience since sitting on a spot or refusing to take one is given quite a bit of uncontested power to whoever is near to the spot. Having time to strategize is a good idea though and the game shouldn’t completely bar a strategic bit of camping, especially since it can lead to moments where your Bingo claims are more strategic towards getting the right line rather than always clambering for the next spot in the sequence.

Panel Action Bingo was likely designed as a game you pop on and get into as far as you can rather than always rubbing against those battles where the cat’s advantage is too great, and while real Bingo is heavily dependent on chance, getting the player involved through moving a character and choosing if you want to pursue a spot or not does mean the game should respect that a bit more with the way it designs optional play modes like Hide and Break D. Panel Action Bingo will probably be at its best against another human player who can make the same choices and face the same barriers as their opponent, but the AI cat still can be on an even keel for a long stretch and it still works as a single player experience even in the weaker modes because of the time the computer-controlled cat takes to get going no matter its advantages. Still, Panel Action Bingo feels like it could have been far more if it planned interesting disruptions to play, relied less on repeating things like the bonus round, and instead focused on ways to alter the action beyond the sliding scale of a cat’s intelligence. Small exciting moments still exist in its current form though, and that already beats out an unambitious adaptation of real Bingo in terms of entertainment value.