Tombola Rebuilds Its Rollercoaster

Rollercoaster Gets Revamped For 2021

For those of you who remember when tombola first launched, you may recall one of the few bingo games available at the time was their Rollercoaster game.

It was one of the first bingo games that didn’t look like traditional bingo, as instead of tickets you had rollercoaster carriages, and instead of numbers you had little passengers on the rollercoaster who would fall out as it went through a loop-the-loop. Be the first player to fill one of the carriages – bingo! You won.

It was a very simple game with a fun theme park design, but unlike most of tombola’s other bingo games, it had not been updated to meet the new demands from web browsers and mobile devices. It still ran on the outdated Flash software and was only available to players on desktop PC. Until now.

Why The Rebuild?

I guess the need to rebuild this game came in part from the desire to make it compatible with mobile devices, but perhaps more pressingly from the countdown to Flash software being discontinued and support for the plugin being removed from Google Chrome in particular. It was widely publicised that from January 1st, Chrome would remove Flash from all browsers due to security concerns.

Tombola therefore decided to close the game down near the end of December, and it finally returned in all it’s new and improved glory on Monday 25th January 2021.

Wayne Goes For A Ride

At first glance, the new version of Rollercoaster seems almost identical to the previous version, but there are a few subtle differences, not least in ticket purchasing which now allows players to buy four tickets for 5p, 10p, 25p or 50p each. Previously the only option was 25p, which did put off some players who like to play for lower stakes.

In this video, Wayne will take you on a quick ride to show you what else is new, and how the basic gameplay works if you’ve not tried it before.

Where Is Lucky 7?

Another old tombola game that disappeared at the end of the year was their Lucky 7 variant. Just like Rollercoaster, this was an older game which was still built in Flash and therefore needed to have a rebuild if it was going to survive in 2021.

However, unlike Rollercoaster, there was no ‘this game will be back soon’ type of message broadcast on the website. It seems that Lucky 7 was simply closed with little to no fanfare at all.

I suspect that this game was deemed surplus to requirements at tombola, and so they’ve decided not to renew it at all. Hopefully, I’ll be proved wrong and a new Lucky 7 bingo game will appear in due course. Time will tell.

Until then, I hope you enjoy riding the new and improved tombola rollercoaster!