Play Español consists of Dalia (the teacher/content developer) and Matz (the software engineer). Dalia is Mexican and Matz is Swedish, so when we got married we wanted to give away something special to our guests. Something that represents both our cultures: Sweden and Mexico. We decided to create our own Lotería game. This is a series of posts about the cards that we created and how they represent us, we hope you will enjoy.
Lottery what?
So what is Lotería? Lotería or “Mexican Bingo” consists of a table of 4×4 cards that is given to each player. The purpose of the game is to get 4 in a row, just like Bingo. The cards that are picked are announced using a “singer” who instead of, like in ordinary Bingo they say the letter and the number, instead of that the announcer describes the card. In this way, you have to think about what is said for each card that is drawn. Especially fun when you first learn Spanish. Another important difference is that instead of using a pen to “dot” the cell, a coffee bean, black bean or even a bottle cap is used to mark the cards that are called.
Background
Mexican Bingo did not actually originate from mexico, it started in Italy in the 15th century and was picked up in Spain in 1700. It was the french entrepreneur Don Clemente Jacques who introduced the game to Mexico. (if you search for Lotería you will come across Clemente version of the game frequently). The game was a part of the “care package” of the soldiers at the time where they would bring the game home and entertain the family.
Read more about it https://muertolandia.com/blogs/news/history-of-the-mexican-loteria-game#:~:text=The%20origin%20of%20loter%C3%ADa%2C%20sometimes,a%20tradition%20at%20Mexican%20fairs
Our idea
The traditional Loteria depicts cards such as “La dama” (the lady), “El Gallo” (the rooster) etc. Because we wanted to represent our cultures and us, we looked long and hard to design and draw our own cards. In this series we will tell the story behind the our cards, the design process. It took me a little over 2 months to prepare the designs, find inspiration, delegate the design on some cards and then create the tables and print them using a Python script.
Each post will feature one card and of course, since we teach Spanish, it will be written in both Spanish and English.
To be continued…