It seems to me that the game of bingo involves itself in one's life in three stages:

First, you experience it as a child in elementary school. It's hard to express the excitement of doing away with the syllabus for a while to enjoy a completely random and skill-less game. This is also when you begin to discover how deeply frustrating the game can be when you've come so damn close to lining up five squares in a row, and then some wins the Tootsie Pop instead of you.

Bingo last enters your life on the sunset of middle age and carries you on through to the end of your life. A new wrinkle involving cash prizes has entered the picture. You will smoke many cigarettes and down many a vodka gimlet.

Somewhere in the middle, though, you will find a thing like The New Frontier Lounge's Rock 'n' Roll Bingo. Every Wednesday, host Brook Pawlicki guides players through a boozy odyssey into the silly, yet oddly competitive, heart of bingo. Pawlicki usually drinks along with the players, so the already pretty lax rules get super loose as the night goes on, letting cards get milked for all they're worth before moving on to new ones. Just about everyone will, at least once, win a prize from a table of ridiculous trinkets, discount bin vinyl oddities, porn DVD's and free drink vouchers. All the while, good music plays in the background to do as much as possible to separate the event from the likely quite depressing bingo halls you'll be visiting later in life.

Being petty and faux-upset about other people winning is, I think, part of the fun. But I'd be doing that anyway. How can such a silly game manage to wind me up like this?

Anyway, because bingo is a game with no stakes and utterly no skill involved, you are freed from the shackles of other bar games or karaoke, allowing you to actually carry on conversations with friends and soon-to-be-friends. Rock 'n' Roll Bingo, finally, makes a compelling argument for leaving your house on a Wednesday night.

[The New Frontier Lounge, 9:30 p.m. Wednesdays, free, $3 wells, $2 session lagers, 301 E. 25th St., Tacoma, 253.572.4020]