Corporate jargon bingo cards to print

Printing corporate jargon bingo cards

Print 1 to 8 cards, two to each A4 or Letter page in black on white, so a black-and-white printer is enough. Each card has its code in the top corner. The link holds the batch’s code, the set and the number of cards, so it prints the same cards next week, for the same meeting. Squares we add to that set in between can change the cards. For a PDF, choose Save as PDF in the print dialog.

Every card is dealt at random from one set, the same sets as buzzword bingo. The general set has 56 phrases for any meeting, and each of the four themed sets has 60. Every phrase in the general set is in the corporate jargon dictionary, and 44 of all 249 are on recent rankings of what office workers hate hearing. With 24 to a card, two cards from one set share about ten phrases on average.

A corporate bingo card as text

Copy a card and it pastes as five lines of five phrases, split by bars, ready for a Slack or Teams message to whoever is joining from home. On a phone, the share sheet opens instead.

Corporate buzzword bingo with paper cards

Hand the cards out before the all-hands starts, one pen each. Players cross phrases off as they hear them, and five in a line takes it. The winner reads the line out afterwards, and anyone who sat through it can say whether they heard all five. Paper beats a phone here, because crossing off a square looks exactly like taking notes. Every phrase on the cards is also a question in the daily corporate jargon quiz.

MIT hackers played it at scale in 1996. Before Vice President Al Gore’s commencement speech, they handed buzzword bingo cards to the graduating class, and Gore acknowledged the prank in the speech.

The meetings worth printing cards for

The return-to-office town hall. Print the all-hands set and listen for new normal, boots on the ground and north star. Collaboration will come up more often than all three, but it isn’t a square, so write it in the free centre. The questions at the end, about desks, parking and the kitchen, won’t use up any squares. Each one is answered with a suggestion to ask HR.

The hiring kickoff. Print the HR and remote set. Hit the ground running, self-starter and fast-paced environment all turn up in the first draft of the job ad, before anyone has written down what the job is.

Rows, columns and the bingo paradox

In number bingo, rows win more often than columns. With many players, a row win is more than three times as likely as a column win, because each B-I-N-G-O column holds its own range of numbers. These cards have no number ranges and every square is dealt at random, so a row and a column are equally likely to finish first.