Free printable Lotería boards — board generator with caller cards

How to make your Lotería boards

1. Set the number of boards — from 1 to 40. One board per player is the classic way; extra boards let kids play two at once.
2. Choose how many boards go on each page: 1 (big, great for small kids and seniors), 2 or 4 (saves paper and ink).
3. Pick the paper: US Letter for the US, Mexico and most of Latin America, A4 for Europe and elsewhere.
4. Pick the card language. Spanish names are the traditional choice; “Español + English” prints both, which is handy in bilingual classrooms.
5. Leave “Caller cards” on if you need a deck for the caller: you get a checklist page plus cut-out cards, 16 per page.
6. Press Print / PDF. In the print dialog choose your printer or “Save as PDF”, keep the scale at 100% and switch off browser headers and footers.

Every set has a short code printed on each board. The page address keeps that code, the number of boards and your settings, so you can bookmark the link and reprint exactly the same set later — handy when a board gets lost or a new guest shows up. Press New set whenever you want fresh boards.

What you get

• Unique boards. Each tabla has 16 different cards drawn from a 54-card deck, and no two boards in a set share the same combination, so every game has a single clear winner.
• A caller sheet. One page lists all 54 cards with tick boxes, so the caller always knows what has already been called and can check a winning board in seconds.
• Cut-out calling cards. Four pages of cards with dashed lines. Cut, shuffle, and draw one at a time — or skip them and call from the checklist.
• Print-ready layout. Boards are drawn in millimetres, not pixels, so they come out sharp on any printer, and the PDF your browser saves is vector, not a blurry image.
• Card numbers. Every card has its number in the corner, which makes checking a board faster and helps younger players who are still learning to read.

How to play Lotería with printed boards

Lotería is the Mexican picture game that families have played for generations at fairs, school kermeses, posadas and Sunday dinners. It works like bingo, but instead of numbers the boards show pictures, and instead of a ball machine there is a caller — the cantor — who draws cards from a shuffled deck and announces them, often with a little rhyme or riddle instead of the plain name.

1. Give each player a board and a handful of markers: dried beans, corn kernels, coins, buttons or bottle caps.
2. The caller shuffles the deck and draws cards one at a time, reading each one out loud.
3. If the called picture is on your board, cover it with a bean.
4. The first player to complete the agreed pattern shouts “¡Lotería!” and wins the round.
5. The caller checks the board against the called cards. Good to go? Clear the boards, reshuffle and start again.

Agree on the pattern before you start. The full board (tabla llena) gives the longest, most dramatic rounds. For quick rounds with kids try a single row, column or diagonal, the four corners, or the 2×2 square in the centre. Many families play several short rounds and then one big full-board round at the end, with a small prize for each.

Printing tips

• Regular 80–90 g/m² paper is fine for one party. For boards you will reuse, print on cardstock or laminate them and use dry-erase markers instead of beans.
• Ink running low? Two or four boards per page use less ink than one big board, and the white background keeps colour use light.
• If the boards come out slightly cut off, check that the scale in the print dialog is 100% (“Actual size”), not “Fit to page”, and that the paper size matches what you chose here.
• On a phone, open the page, press Print / PDF and choose “Save as PDF” — then send the file to any printer or a print shop.
• Print the caller cards on thicker paper if you can: thin cards are hard to shuffle.

Ideas for using printable Lotería

Classrooms. Lotería is a favourite with Spanish teachers: the bilingual card names turn each round into vocabulary practice, and students can take turns being the caller. Thirty students? Print 30 boards, two per page, and you are ready in five minutes.

Family nights and parties. Birthday parties, baby showers, Mexican-themed fiestas, Cinco de Mayo, Hispanic Heritage Month events, holiday posadas or a simple game night with the grandparents — Lotería works for ages four to ninety-four and needs no reading skills beyond recognising pictures.

Senior centres and community events. One board per page prints large, clear pictures that are easy to see. The caller can read slowly and show each card to the room.

About our deck

The boards use our own 54-card deck in the spirit of the traditional game — The Sun, The Moon, The Rooster, The Cactus, The Chili, The Piñata, The Tamale, The Skull and more. The pictures are simple, colourful emoji-style images, the same ones you see in the online version on playparty.live, so a printed board and a game on screen look alike. It is not a copy of any commercial deck, and it is family-friendly from the first card to the last.

Holiday decks

The deck menu in the generator also has themed decks: Navidad, Christmas, Hanukkah, Winter & New Year, Day of the Dead, baby shower and bridal shower. Two of them have their own ready-to-print pages: Christmas bingo cards and Hanukkah bingo cards.

Play Lotería online, too

No printer nearby, or the family is spread across different cities? Play Lotería online on playparty.live: the server is the caller, everyone gets a random board on their phone or laptop, beans go down with a tap and the game checks who shouted first. Create a room, send the link, and you are playing in ten seconds — free, no registration, bots fill the empty seats.

🌵 Play Lotería online