Play Tambola with Playing Cards

All of us have played Tambola in social gatherings, office get-togethers, kitty parties and society events. To play the standard version of Tambola / Housie, read How to play Tambola. If you are looking for a new way of playing Tambola, read on… 🙂

For convenience, lets call this New Game – Tambola Card Game!
You might also like to read about another popular game – How to play Dumb Charades.

What is needed to play this Tambola Game

• A deck of playing cards to call out the Indices (instead of the standard Tambola Board)
• Tickets made at home with paper, ruler, sketch pens
• Pen or pencils to strike the called out indices on the tickets
• Prizes, if not playing with collected money

How does the Tambola Card ticket Look

Explanation of the Tambola Card ticket

The most common deck of 52 playing cards in use today includes 13 ranks of each of the four French suits, clubs (♣), diamonds (♦), hearts (♥) and spades (♠).

Now refer the sample Tambola Card Ticket above. While the top row shows the 4 suites of playing cards, the first column can have any 4 unique numbers in the range 1-13 (index of playing cards).

Note: In this game, 2-10 numbers represent the same corresponding index in the playing cards. Some special representations are:

While preparing tickets, make sure you write the unique numbers in the first column yourself and do not leave it to be written by the players themselves. If left onto players to write, they might cheat by writing the numbers as they are called out. 😉

Possible Variations
Our sample Tambola Card ticket has 4 rows with 4 unique numbers in the range 1-13. You may have any number of rows, depending upon the number of expected people who’ll play, the desired duration of the game and the number of prizes /winning points you’d like to keep.

How to play the New Tambola Game

The Caller will shuffle the cards and pick up the top card from the deck facing down. Say, the card is called out as:
J 

Now every person who has a cell with J (11) and  will cross the cell as shown in the examples below:

Now say, the next card that is called out is:

A 

Now, after marking this one, our example tickets will look like:

 

Sample Winning Points

Each completed Row could deserve a Prize.
This means the first ticket that is presented for completing Row 1, Row 2, Row 3 and so on will be verified for the prize for the corresponding row. The verification rules are the same as in case of standard Tambola (housie) game. In our example, tickets that can claim the prize for Row 1 will look like:

 

While you decide on the rules of the game, winning points, prizes etc. at the beginning of the game, decide on what to do in case there is a tie. In case of tie, when there are 2 or more tickets verified successfully for the same winning point, say Row 1, you could either allow splitting of the prize (if possible), or cancel these claims, keeping the winning point open to all for claim.

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You May Also like:

• How to play Tambola
• Free Printable Tambola Game – Learn How to Play Tambola
• How to play Dumb Charades

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