A couple weeks ago, we announced that we were looking for bingo cards of prompts for our upcoming Potluck Bingo challenge. That challenge is now live, and you can sample the five-star offerings of prompts, beautifully crafted and served on an array of bingo cards!

We generally run one bingo card challenge each year (after the uproarious success of Back to Middle-earth Month 2012, which the SWG mods who lived through it still regard with a mixture of awe and trauma—trawema, if you will), so if you want to create a fanwork or write a comment for this challenge (and we hope you do), then a quick rundown of how bingo card challenges work is in order. We are not calling numbers for this challenge; you can create for any prompt you want on any card you want. If you made a card, you are under no obligation to play it, or you can go wild on your own prompts. You can combine multiple prompts into a single fanwork (from the same card or different cards). The various ways that prompts combine is part of the fun of bingo challenges!

Of course, if you've played actual bingo in a drafty church hall with blue-haired old ladies and their array of lucky charms and fierce combativeness, you know how rabid bingo aficionados can be about winning bingo. Our challenges don't expect you to fill lines, but we of course welcome you to try! There are special stamps available for participants who do. Let a mod know if you've achieved bingo, which we define as filling prompts in horizontal, vertical, or diagonal lines or (for the truly ambitious!) all prompts on a card. There is also a special stamp for players who play multiple boards.

As always, all types of fanwork are welcome on our archive. (If you're new to our challenges, find our challenge guidelines here.) We also have bingo boards for leaving comments, and we are accepting new cards for the duration of the challenge. The Potluck Bingo page has guidelines and templates for making cards.

This challenge runs through January 15, 2025, but because the first challenge of the new year is always an amnesty challenge where you can create for any of our 2024 challenges you missed and receive the stamps, you will have until February 15, 2025, to post responses to this challenge and receive stamps.

In other challenge-related news, we had several members collaborate to solve the Orctober riddle for last month's challenge. I've set up the form for requesting riddle clues to email me when there are new requests, so if you haven't solved it yet (or even started!) but want to try, feel free to keep sending clue requests.

And a few other reminders: Tolkien Meta Week begins December 8, and we are still accepting proposals for presentations at our July 19 Mereth Aderthad hybrid event!