Tombola Bingo Review

Tombola Bingo Overview

Tombola operates one of the largest bingo sites out there, mainly thanks to the fact they used to be The Sun’s bingo operator and kept all the customers when The Sun switched to using Jackpot Joy’s software. Now they’ve gone it alone but they’re still huge with as many as 10,000 players a day on their bingo site.

From talking to other players, Tombola is a bit of a Marmite bingo site – you either love it or hate it. It has a huge range of rooms to choose from and there’s always someone to chat to but the sheer number of players means it is hard to make friends with regular roomies as everyone is always moving around. Amazingly there are no slot games at all on the site, which is good as it stops me losing all my money on them but is a shame because I like playing them when I don’t feel like a game of bingo.

Signing up

When you play on the site for the first time the registration process is a bit confusing and long winded, especially if you don’t know anyone else who plays on the site or have a bonus code (I didn’t have either). After that it is simple; you are taken straight to a deposit screen where you can claim your cash match bonus on your first deposit, up to £25. Deposit methods are credit and debit cards only and there are no other payment options such as Paypal or UKash, which is a bit strange given how big the site is.

Tombola Bingo’s home page

Once registered you are taken to a home page full of information – it’s all a bit daunting and the tiny light blue text on a white background made it difficult to read about their latest promotions. But the main games are listed on the left hand side – these are 90, 80 and 75 ball bingo plus Bingo Lite, Cinco (basically bingo with cards), Battleships and Hamster Race. There is also currently a game called Carnival which you can play once a day for free and win up to £100.

Playing Tombola’s games

The actual games themselves are really well designed and easy to follow. Whoever has built this site has done a great job and because Tombola don’t run any other sites this is the only place to play them. You can always find a big jackpot room to play bingo in – I just found a game with 792 players and a full house jackpot of £480 for a 20p ticket at 11am! All the games have chat rooms and there are always plenty of people there, although I found the chat often didn’t have much depth to it with lots of 2tg and wdws but not much of people chatting about their lives. I guess that’s partly down to the CMing, which I thought was a bit low key. But perhaps that was just the games I played in.

Anyone who has seen their TV ad might have thought Tombola would be a bit odd – their ad is definitely one of the strangest bingo ads I have ever seen – but in fact it’s a great site.

Our verdict

At the moment they are offering tons of player promotions and added prize money in the rooms, partly to keep all the players from The Sun in their rooms rather than have them move over to the new site. That’s good for new players signing up and I’ll definitely be playing a lot more at Tombola in the next few months.