This is a goofy bingo app I put together a few years ago based on a game that we would play with our friends. We had been watching a lot of terrible Hallmark movies and noticed that they were all kind of the same plot and had a lot of other similarities. Many of them are filmed in Canada, star sitcom actors, feature a particular woman's hairstyle, etc.

And so we made cards and hosted parties, but making 30 or so different cards and updating them when we wanted to add stuff was a huge pain so I made this app that would generate cards randomly.

When the pandemic hit, it actually made for a better experience to play the game over zoom — players could watch the movie on a laptop and make jokes in the chat, and they could open this app on a phone.

There's some features that were added to account for this, if players accidentally refreshed the page, their card wouldn't re-randomize, and their marks would remain on the card. If you want a new card, you have to explicitly request it with a button at the bottom.

There's an algorithm to determine which Christmas movie trope should appear in each bingo square. It's not very sophisticated but the gist of it is that the script picks a number and then based on that picks an item from the list based on a "rarity" score that we've assigned it. The higher the number, the less likely the script will pick it. This is not very scientific, and the rarity scores that were assigned were based almost entirely on likely we thought something should be to get picked.

What you wouldn't know if you just came to this site to play this game is that we tweaked the probabilities for each movie we screened. If we knew a certain thing didn't happen in the movie we were going to show at a zoom party, we'd make it less likely to appear or take it off completely. After a while, we'd amassed a lot of these tropes, and to be fair, the numbers weren't shaking out as frequently as we'd like so we had to dial it back a bit.

But no more. This app is now using a set of data that should be applicable to most Lifetime/Hallmark style Christmas movies. If you want to play this with friends, here is a table of all of the different tropes that can come up. You could print it out and check things off or just click the items to highlight them to keep track. Refreshing the page keeps your highlights here, too.

One aspect of the game is that players might argue that a certain scene counts as one of the tropes. Ultimately it's up to the bingo caller to decide, but it's kind of fun to make a case for inclusion. Here's some explainers for how we defined stuff