Poké Bingo deals you a character and asks where they fit. Twelve condition cells sit on the board — a region, a trainer class, an organization, a type, a debut series, a power bracket, whether they own a legendary — and a queue of characters arrives one at a time for you to place.

It is the only game on the site where the clock is also the scoreboard. You start with two minutes, a correct placement adds eight seconds and a wrong one takes eight away, so the board either opens up in front of you or closes down around you depending on how sure you are.

A character appears above a four-by-three grid of conditions. Tap the cell whose condition that character genuinely satisfies. The cell locks with their portrait and a green tick, and the next character is dealt.

A wrong tap shakes the cell red and costs eight seconds, and the same character stays in front of you — so a bad guess does not move you on, it just makes the round shorter. Skip is unlimited and completely free, and passing on a character you cannot place is almost always the right move.

Fill all twelve cells before the clock hits zero to win. The leaderboard ranks by how much time you had left, so the board is really a race: everyone gets the same twelve conditions and the same order of characters that day.

Read the whole board before you place anyone. Characters often satisfy two or three open cells, and spending a versatile character on a broad condition leaves the specific cells — a rare type, a narrow power bracket — with nobody left who fits.

Skip early and skip often. A skip costs nothing at all while a wrong tap costs eight seconds and does not clear the character, so the break-even point strongly favours passing on anything you are not sure about and waiting for the queue to bring you someone obvious.

Keep the awkward cells in mind as you go. Power brackets and legendary ownership are hard to eyeball, so when a character you know fits one of them appears, place them there rather than in the region cell they would also satisfy.