Festival bingo: 14 predictions for a weekend with friends

A festival weekend is a test lab for friendships. Three days with the same people, a campsite full of tent pegs, tens of thousands of strangers, stages twenty minutes' walk apart – and a phone whose battery gives up a little earlier every day. If you've been to a festival with friends before, you already know who pitches the tent, who knows the timetable by heart and who suddenly vanishes on Saturday night. Typical turns that knowledge into a game: before you travel, everyone writes predictions about the others, on site you tick off what happens, and the first to fill a line wins. What's written about you only shows up once it has happened. The basics of a round are explained in the how-to-play guide.

How to set up the round

• Write before you travel. Create the round a few days ahead, for example while you plan the lift. On site there's no peace for writing – and often no signal either.
• Card size by group and length. For a Friday-to-Sunday weekend, 3 × 3 or 4 × 4 works. If there are eight or more of you, team mode is worth it: one team per tent, assigned by hand, keeps together the people who wake up together anyway.
• End date on departure day. Set the end date to Sunday evening or Monday midday, once the tent is down. The round then ends by itself, and nobody has to remember it while packing up.
• A prize that suits the festival. The winner doesn't have to pull out tent pegs, gets their first meal at the food truck paid for, or picks the music on the drive home. A good penalty for everyone else: drying the wet tent at home.
• Free writing rather than Blitz. Blitz mode is handy if you start on a whim in the car; the category “On the road” fits best then. For a festival, your own sentences pay off more, because only you know who would never miss which band.

14 predictions for a festival weekend

These sentences are meant to be adapted. Put a name in front of each one in your head and ask yourselves who it has a real chance with:

• comes back to the tent with less than ten percent battery
• borrows a power bank from someone in the group
• suggests a fixed meeting point in case anyone gets lost
• loses sight of the group in front of the main stage
• writes “Where are you?” in the group chat
• pitches the tent without the instructions and then gets them out after all
• is first in the queue for the showers on Saturday morning
• gets caught in the rain even though the weather app gave a warning
• buys a shirt at the merch stand
• sings along to a band nobody in the group knew before
• makes it to the front row at a show
• sleeps through a set an alarm was set for
• raves about a food truck all day long
• runs into someone from home on the festival grounds

Also from Blitz mode

Some sentences from the “On the road” category fit any campsite. You can let Blitz mode draw them or use them as a template for your own:

• gets lost despite the map
• realizes they forgot to pack something important
• photographs the view
• asks strangers for directions
• tells a story from an earlier trip
• walks more than 20,000 steps in one day
• takes their shoes off during the trip

Tips for the festival weekend

• Who's in charge? The best host is whoever is organising the lift anyway and has a power bank. Start the round in good time before you travel, so everyone can look at their card on the way there.
• Tick off when it happens – or in the evening at the tent. If the network on site is overloaded, remember what came true and tick it off as soon as you have signal again. A photo at the right moment settles any later argument about whether it really happened.
• Predictions people can see. At a festival the group splits up all the time: two at the small stage, three at the food stalls, one asleep in the tent. So write sentences that several people will notice or that show up in the group chat, rather than things only one person can spot.
• Save your battery. Nobody needs to keep Typical open all the time. A look at lunchtime and one in the evening are enough; that leaves plenty of power for meeting points and photos.
• Bring in the quieter ones. Because everyone writes about the others, the quieter ones' sentences are on the cards too. Ask them in the evening what they've noticed – people who talk less often see more.
• Stay kind. At a festival, tiredness, rain and the odd bad mood all come together. Don't write about money, bodies or old arguments. A good sentence makes even the person it's about laugh when the cards are revealed.

Common mistakes

• Too big a card. A 5 × 5 rarely fills up over one weekend. Better a smaller card that's still exciting on Sunday.
• Sentences tied to the timetable. “Sees band X” falls flat if the band cancels or something else is on at the same time. Write the behaviour, not the programme slot: “talks the group into a band nobody else knows”.
• Sentences that are too general. “Has fun” always comes true, which makes it boring. The magic is in the sentence where everyone knows at once, when it's ticked off, why it was there.

If you're travelling on straight after the festival, you'll find more ideas in the predictions for the road.