The history of the popular game Lotería takes us from cigar manufacturing to tarot readings to the modern day. This week we take a look at changes to the game over the years and this game’s influence in Chicano culture. We also ask: is there ever a time you should try to lose a game?

Topics: Lotería, Mexican bingo, card games, tarot, Spanish history, Mexican history, colonialism, history of games, competition, pinto beans, Mexican games, hispanic, latino, latinx, latine, cultural games, international games

Note: Knucklebones is produced and designed to be heard. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis. Abbreviated transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

Monica

If you grew up in the United States, chances are you played one or two classic board games with your family. Monopoly, Scrabble, Battleship, Parcheesi. Well, on top of the pile of classic board games in my house was a game called Lotería. Until recently, I assumed this was just another staple for families everywhere. I hadn’t really given it much thought, at least not until I was chatting with a few friends about games they used to play. Lotería, they asked, what’s that? And I said, it’s like bingo with pictures. It has a mermaid, the shrimp, watermelon, blank stares all around. It turns out Lotería is more popular in Hispanic households. I’ve heard it referred to casually as Mexican bingo, but I’ve definitely seen this game around and becoming more popular. There are even a few modern variations on it. Take a look online and you’ll see there’s a millennial Lotería that first came out in 2018. In 2019, Google created an interactive doodle game with the pictures updated and reimagined. Well, today we take a closer look at the history of Lotería, how cigar merchants helped popularize it, and ask just how essential is it to have a bag of raw pinto beans on hand when playing?

Rebeca

And the bag of beans, pinto beans that we kept to play Lotería, because apparently there is no copy of Lotería in existence. that also provides the pieces, the play.

Monica

Welcome to Knucklebones, a narrative podcast where we talk about the impact of games in our everyday lives. I’m your host, Monica Felix, and for today’s episode, we have a look at the popular game Lotería, or Mexican Bingo. Since this game was such a big part of my childhood, I decided I needed a little help to tell this story. I reached out to my sister, Rebeca, and asked her if she had a copy of the game lying around.

Rebeca

I was looking for my Lotería cards and I can’t find them.

Monica

Eventually she was able to track it down and we noticed a few differences in our copies. Yeah, mine is the original uncensored. Yeah, it has some pretty interesting imagery in here. I got it from, it was actually a candy store in Pilsen. Before we get into some of the images used for this game, Let’s talk about how the game is played. I asked Rebeca to explain for you.

Rebeca

Get a column, you can fill the cards, you can go around the border of the card, you can get fancy with it and go on the diagonal.

Monica

And I remember for fun, when we wanted the game to last longer, we would fill the whole board.

Rebeca

I saw it very easy.

Monica

Right. And some people said, well, you have one where you put it in the four corners. or you do a little cluster of four. Yeah, like the top right four. I haven’t seen that one.

Rebeca

I have a feeling ours since we were kids was more to take up our time than staying true to the game.

Monica

Simple, right? Now, the major difference from bingo is that instead of a person calling out numbers and players putting stamps on the numbers on a card, Lotería is played with pictures. Most versions of the game have different cards for players to choose from, and each card has 16 pictures. The pictures are generally of an everyday object and then the name of that object written below it in Spanish. For example, there’s a pear, la pera, a watermelon or sandia, a shrimp or el camarón. It even has the devil.

Rebeca

And Diablo, he’s sassy looking. They gave him some short shorts, too. Short shorts.

Monica

Wow, that is sassy. So to play the game, someone draws from a deck of cards and calls the name out loud. The tree! And then anyone with a tree on their sheet marks it. After spending some time reading more about the game, I learned that there’s a name for the person who’s supposed to draw cards from the deck and announce it. That’s the cantador, or the caller. It turns out that traditionally, the caller would find a funny or creative way to announce the cards. They might improvise a short poem, use a familiar phrase that includes the word, or make a funny rhyme. I asked my sister about this. Did you ever come up with any rhymes, any little stories while you were reading these out loud?

Rebeca

No. Just the mental pressure of trying to guess these was a lot.

Monica

What’s nice about most of these editions of the game is they actually include little rhymes or expressions with the game. Rebeca and I compared notes on our versions. Yeah, so it has this card that came with it. And it has like size 2 font, really tiny. And it has these little rhymes or riddles, which I hadn’t really paid attention to either. Because, you know, we’d sit there, pull the card, and I like pulling the cards and saying the Spanish words out loud. So I’m just like, la campana! And that’s it.

Rebeca

But there’s- Yeah, that’s how we learned pronouns.

Monica

Right, it’s like a little joke. And so I’m looking at La Campana and it says, La Campana y tu te bajo. What is the joke there?

Rebeca

Yeah, it’s not a joke. They’re supposed to be riddles or just poetry in relation to everything. Kind of like we would sing the Spanish chicken song when we got el Gayo, which you know sounds crazy without contest. So we’d be going, El Gayo, el Gayo, el Gayo. Yeah. And for some reason, that was just the song you sang when you got the chicken card or the rooster card.

Monica

It’s a rooster.

Rebeca

Oh, it’s the chicken card. Because there’s a rooster and a chicken, I think. There’s a guyo and then there’s the, oh yeah, a guyo.

Monica

Yeah. Did you ever question why it’s a rooster?

Rebeca

Honestly, no. I did not.

Monica

Well, I did. Why the rooster? How did this game get started? It turns out that the story of Lotería begins in 15th century Italy. Early versions of the game were used for gambling and light entertainment. The game made its way to Spain, which was then introduced to Mexico, or New Spain as it was known at the time, in 1769. Lotería was played by the upper class at first, but eventually became popular as more people started playing during traveling fairs. The version of Lotería that we know these days, and the version that I have at home, can be traced back to a French businessman by the name of Don Clemente Jacques. In 1887, he purchased a manufacturing plant in Mexico to produce packaged foods, corks, bottles, and ammunition. Within the plant, they had a printing press division that they used to create labels for the packaged foods along with advertisements and calendars. Eventually, they began printing the game Lotería as well as part of a marketing campaign. Small versions of the cards were included in the canned military products sent to Mexican soldiers. The soldiers would then bring the games home to their families and it became a big hit. He was widely known as Don Clemente Gallo, the Spanish word for rooster, as this is the national emblem of France. If you have one of the commonly sold versions of the game, you’ll see Gallo, G-A-L-L-O, in a banner across the front, and the first card of the game is the rooster. Now, although Don Clemente registered the trademark and is credited with the popular version of the game, the story of Lotería is not complete without talking about Jose Maria Evia Grignier. a cigar merchant in Campeche, Mexico. In 1891, Evia Grenier founded a factory called La Esperanza that sold cigars. He used the printing resources at the factory to create high-quality stickers of Lotería illustrations that were included within cigar packages as a fun promotion. There were 90 illustrations in all to collect, so the promotion encouraged people to continue to buy his brand of cigars to collect them all. Collectors would take the stickers and attach them to wood or cardboard to create their own playing tablets. Eventually, the game was played at festivals and celebrations. This version of the game was originally called Esperanza Lotería, named after the cigar factory, but later became known as the Campechana Lotería after the town where it was popularized. Going back through this childhood game with my sister, what stands out the most, of course, are the pictures. As a little girl, I love the artwork for the rose and the sun. Looking back on the images after several years, a few things did stand out though. The first was card number 26, which shows a man in a suit with dark skin. The text below him reads, El Negrito. This could be translated as the little black man. While some responses to this have been that the diminutive form is a term of endearment, plenty of others have read it as condescending. The game includes small verses for each picture that we’ll talk about later. For this one, the verse is El que se comio el a sucar, or the one who ate the sugar. I was curious to see how other players have interpreted this. One theory is that it has connotations to the slave industry in the Americas and is referencing the sugar plantations. Another reading I came across was He ate the sugar, which gives him a sweet, friendly disposition. That one seems to go hand in hand with the diminutive as endearing. Another interpretation reads his outfit as dressed as a tap dancer, recalling American minstrel images of the 19th century. Likewise, card number 38 is El Apache, the Apache. We see a man dressed in a feather headdress and sandals. He holds bow and arrow. The imagery has been interpreted as representing indigenous peoples as wild or savage. Scholars have read both El Negrito and El Apache, among others, as reflecting 19th and 20th century class, racial, and ethnic hierarchies. Going back to our different editions of the game, Rebeca noticed another unexpected change.

Rebeca

Well, then I’m wondering where mine came from, because mine is like a newer version, I guess.

Monica

Really, you have a censored version of Lotería?

Rebeca

Let me see if I can find the mermaid lady. Do you have your mermaid lady?

Monica

Yeah, right here.

Rebeca

All right, we’re going to compare mermaids. Let me find one. Oh.

Monica

Yep.

Rebeca

Buns out, buns out. That’s what she’s doing. Let’s see. She is enjoying life.

Monica

Live and free. Just as an aside here, the imagery has changed many times over centuries to match the social moment, the players, and the context of play. Some of the early illustrations were based on tarot cards during the Italian Renaissance. To this day, you see this influence in the images of the sun, moon, and star in the game. The game also was shaped by religious influences over the years. You can check the article on knucklebones.org to see a few versions of Lotería illustrations, including an educational liturgical version that was played in the 1930s.

The images are taken from Catholic theology. Yet another version of the illustrations were developed famous 19th century political cartoonist Jose Guadalupe Posada. His version of Lotería included recognizable icons of the time, like the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata and the former Mexican president Francisco Madero.

At this particular moment in history, October 2026, we saw updates to the mermaid. Back to Rebeca, who had a few modern adjustments to her version.

Rebeca

Okay, are you ready for this? Are you ready for the travesty?

Monica

She’s wearing a tube top. What?

Rebeca

Where did she get a tube top? They feted her. Why would you do that? Look at that. It’s just so awkward looking. Look.

Monica

Major changes all around. When I initially opened my box of Lotería, I pulled out the cards, then felt around inside the box expecting to find something. I realized I was looking for a small pile of raw pinto beans, since that’s what we used to mark the cards when we were kids. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that these were not standard issue with the game.

Rebeca

And the bag of beans, pinto beans that we kept to play Lotería, because apparently there is no copy of Lotería in existence that also provides the pieces to play Lotería.

Monica

Okay, if you take a look, this is what came with mine. You see this? It’s like little fichas, these little chips that come with it. I feel cheated. I was like, where are the beans? And that’s when it dawned on me that we bought the beans separately to eat.

Rebeca

The beans were something that we already had and we just reused the same bag of beans the entire time, which was hilarious if you think about it. It’s cheap.

Monica

As we put our Lotería away, I thought about what an influence this game had on me as a kid, playing with my sister from age 5 until I was ready for more challenging games. It was the beginning of a lifelong love of games that took me to chess tournaments, organizing public gaming events, and eventually this podcast. Rebeca is five years older and probably had to sit through dozens of games with her little sister that weren’t much of a challenge for the first few years. At first, I wondered if she ever let me win. It made me wonder about the social dynamics of winning and losing games. Are there ever times when it’s advisable to lose a game? I thought it’d be interesting to talk about when should you let someone win, if ever. I gave you kind of a prompt for this and just to kind of kick things off, can you think of a time when you thought it’s really not actually appropriate for me to win or maybe I shouldn’t win?

Rebeca

Are we talking about this in the context of acknowledging that you’re my little sister and we’ve had to come across this situation over time and over the years? And it’s like, oh, let Monica win. Oh, no.

Monica

When did you ever let me win? I’m pretty sure I won.

Rebeca

Oh, I’m sorry. You’re 5 years younger than me, 4 1/2 years younger. OK, so a picture picture. Picture me and Monica many, many, many years ago with the four and a half year difference in I’m 10 with a five-year-old sister who wants to play Candyland or Kids Monopoly. And you’re just tired and you don’t want to have to deal with the sister tantrum that one of you is going to have one of you. So you just kind of maybe stack the deck. so that you either win or lose.

Monica

That’s really fascinating because I have a very clear memory of just decimating you in those games. And I’m pretty sure it was due to my strategic prowess, but.

Rebeca

You were five, come on.

Monica

So you’re in the camp that the point of playing games is to have fun.

Rebeca

Not. to beat your competitor to a pulp. Yes. We’re both hairy.

Monica

Not everybody thinks that. You know, not everybody’s worried.

Rebeca

The very purpose. If I’m sitting at home with a friend or a family member, I’m not there to defeat this person and make them feel bad about themselves or in turn, you know. suck at everything I do. So it’s you’re there to have fun. You’re there to play games. The purpose is to do a group activity together.

Monica

Okay.

Rebeca

Not to have everyone walk away with generational trauma. Like that’s not the point of playing a game.

Monica

So, so here’s one for you. You’re playing the little kid. You want the little kid to have fun or, you know, some other opponent and you’re like, you know what, I’m a letter. Everybody’s happy. But here’s the thing. You lose. Are you having fun?

Rebeca

As long as I knew I played fairly and I’m hanging out with someone I enjoy hanging out with, yeah, it’s fun. But I’m not going to like intentionally, consistently lose to blow up someone’s ego. Like I’m not doing them any favors either.

Monica

Okay, so Becky’s life rules for gameplay, lose when it’s the ethical thing to do or if it makes little kids feel good about it.

Rebeca

It has nothing to do with ethics. It’s about fun. Am I having fun? Sure. Are you worried about who’s losing? No. If you are worried about who’s winning and losing, guess what? Go into sports. Go do something professionally. Go join a league.

Monica

So sports are not games to you necessarily. It’s like a different category of game.

Rebeca

Yes.

Monica

Okay. And specifically, they’re competitive. So that’s another question I had. Do you enjoy Competitive games sometimes and what do you enjoy about them?

Rebeca

Yeah, competitive games are fun. I like the team sports a little better because then it’s not just on me. Whereas something like chess or checkers feels very personal. And again, that is a companion game where you’re just sitting there to play with someone else. But I also don’t like games where I’m going to go injure myself. So I’m staying away from football, soccer, anything physically heavy like that.

Monica

Okay.

Rebeca

But I love trivia. Like there’s trivia games. You can go do bar crawl, not brawl, but it’s bar trivia with groups of people. And that’s fun because then you can show off how smart you are.

Monica

Are there any particular themes that you like?

Rebeca

Lately, a lot of the trivia videos I’ve been watching have been like songs from the 50s onwards or you get a still shot from a movie. There was a fun one where you had to identify the house or you had to identify the movie by the house. You would know it was like the Halloween house based by on the facade of the home you’re looking at. or the inside, something like Pee Wee Herman’s house is iconic in the movie. So you just know, well, it is Pee Wee. Yes. But then the important part there is that your partners who are playing with have to allow you time to participate as well. Because if you have one person screaming out all the answers, then it’s like, well, why am I here? I’m just here to watch you show off how smart you are.

Monica

Okay.

Rebeca

And that’s not the point.

Monica

So interesting to me because even when you’re talking about like one person versus another in a game like checkers or chess, you still perceive it as a partnership. We’re here together experiencing this as opposed to me versus you.

Rebeca

Yes, there’s a reason you played a game with me. It’s to spend time with me. If you want to go out and show somebody how awesome you are and defeat them and absolutely demolish and embarrass someone in the game, go to professionally. Go somewhere where you don’t know anyone. You can go smoosh people and have your ego feel better about yourself. But if I’m playing a game at home and I’m playing cards, we’re here to play. There’s going to be a little bit of, you know, competitiveness, that’s fine, but I still have to see you in my daily life.

Monica

Let’s say you get invited to trivia night. It’s all about Phantom of the Opera. And Becky’s a big expert on all things Andrew Lloyd Webber, and you’re going to show up And it turns out that there’s a prize fund as well. First place gets a welcome with 500 bucks. Are you in it for the camaraderie or are you going to crush people?

Rebeca

Because you’ve set that environment where it’s competitive. There’s money, there is a fund, there is a prize. I don’t have a $500 fund at home or if I’m going to a friend’s house. Like no, because you’ve pulled it out of the fun and camaraderie and now it’s You’re giving me an incentive to crush money is like it’s no completely different. Completely different. You brought money into the equation.

Monica

So if there’s money, it’s not for fun. Right. Then it’s like a job.

Rebeca

No, it’s not. It’s for the money at that point.

Monica

See, that’s interesting to know, because I think you see it. Well, everybody sees it so differently. For some people, you don’t even need money. You know, anytime there’s a game playing environment, It is always winners and losers, or that just specifically fine games that are always zero-sum games, no collaborative games.

Rebeca

I am not here to smush people. I’m here to have fun.

Monica

Yeah, smushing.

Rebeca

And interact with people I like.

Monica

Well, this was a fun one. It was kind of fun to go back through the cards and have these little moments.

Rebeca

About the beans, Monica. The beans.

Monica

Triggering childhood memories.

Rebeca

The beans. The beans.

Monica

This week’s Knucklebones episode was written and produced by me, Monica Felix. Many thanks to my guest and sister, Rebeca, for the trip down memory lane. We’d love for you to share your own Lotería stories. Did you play Lotería in Spanish class to learn the language? Maybe you grew up playing with your family and have a funny moment or question. You can send us an e-mail or even a video recording of your Lotería thoughts to info at knucklebones.org. You can also read the Lotería article on http://www..knucklebones.org, which includes images of some of these incredible illustrations from the game over the years. The music throughout the episode is by Eric Matias and downloaded from http://www..soundimage.org. If you enjoyed this episode, we hope you’ll consider subscribing to Knuckle Bones wherever you get your podcasts. Until next week.

Episode written and produced by Monica Felix. The music throughout this episode is by Eric Matias and downloaded from http://www.soundimage.org. If you want to get in touch or have a great story to share about how games have been a part of your life, you can e-mail us at info@knucklebones.org. Share your own Lotería stories or questions in the comments on this article! We also hope you’ll join the conversation on our Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube channels (all can be found @KnucklebonesPodcast).

If you enjoyed this episode, we hope you’ll consider subscribing to Knucklebones wherever you get your podcasts.

Sources:

Alcocer Bernés, José Manuel. (Date Unknown). Lotería Campechana. Una bolada con historia. Revista BiCentenario. https://revistabicentenario.com.mx/index.php/archivos/Lotería-campechana-una-bolada-con-historia/

Campos, P. (2019, December 9). Celebrating Lotería! Google Doodles. https://doodles.google/doodle/celebrating-Lotería/

Guadalupe Posada, J. (1910). Lotería Game . Public Domain Image Archive.

https://pdimagearchive.org/images/0d474e8f-c338-413f-a77c-ff72f87fea1b

Lotería Campechana: Creada en 1895 por José María Evia Griñé. https://Loteríacampechana.wordpress.com/entradas/

Maurer, T. (2024). A Brief History of Lotería. ¡Qué Sabor!San Antonio. https://www.quesaborsanantonio.com/brief-history-of-loter%C3%ADa

Pozos Lanz, Ileana and Juan Carlos Saucedo. (1995). 100 años de Lotería campechana, INBA/Gobieno del Estado de Campeche.

Raikar, S.P., Kelleher, D. (2026, October 2). Lotería. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Loteria-card-game

Villegas, T. (2026, October 16). History of La Lotería. Teresa Villegas. https://teresavillegas.com/history-of-la-Lotería/