🎯 Tree bingo — three printable cards for a Toronto walk
The premise is uncomplicated. You walk somewhere. You look at trees. When you see a species on your card, you mark it off. The first to fill a row — or a full card, depending on what you agree on at the start — wins. The game works as a solo training exercise, a kids' walk, a friendly competition with someone you live with, and, on the harder card, a genuine treasure hunt.
Print or screenshot any of the three cards below. Each is 5×5, with a central "free" square (in the bingo tradition). The species are drawn from treeto.ca's catalogue of 689,013 city-owned street trees — common, less-common, and rare. The exact difficulty depends on where you walk; some species cluster heavily by neighbourhood (red oak in the Beaches; Norway maple in postwar suburbs; pawpaw on a single block in Roncesvalles), and the card you should choose depends on the territory you're playing in.
· or screenshot any card.
The found-on-any-block card
Every species on this card appears on more than 5,000 Toronto streets. A 15-minute walk through any residential neighbourhood should hit 8 to 12 of them. Good for kids learning the genera, and for adults who want to start paying attention.
The neighbourhood-walker card
A long walk through a varied neighbourhood — say, 45 minutes across both old and new sections of Leaside or the Annex — should clear 5 to 10 of these. Worth studying the species pages beforehand if you want to ID with confidence.
The treasure-hunt card
Some of these have fewer than 100 individuals in the city. A few are deliberate ornamental experiments; a couple are Carolinian natives at the northern edge of their range. Catching a single one is its own reward; filling a row in a day is a real achievement. Best played on a curated route or across multiple walks.
How to play
Standard rules
- Walk somewhere. When you see a species on your card, mark it off (any pencil, pen, or finger-on-screenshot works).
- Bingo: five in a row — horizontal, vertical, or diagonal. First player to call bingo wins the round.
- Full card (the long version): every square checked. Can take a single walk or accumulate across several.
- The centre square is free.
- Identification rule: you have to be reasonably confident. If unsure, search the address on treeto.ca to confirm.
Variant rules
- Speed run: time-limit your walk to 30 minutes. Whoever's marked the most squares wins.
- Genus only: any species of the right genus counts (any maple, any oak, any cherry). Lower the bar for kids.
- Photo verification: every claimed species must be photographed. Settles ties and makes the walk a slow, attentive looking exercise rather than a sprint.
- Block-by-block: instead of a walk, work a single residential block as thoroughly as you can. Most blocks in the old-grid neighbourhoods will host 15–25 species; the diversity is surprising.
Where to play
Easy card: any residential block in the city. The species are common enough that you can play in your own neighbourhood without preparation.
Medium card: the older streetcar suburbs (Roncesvalles, Cabbagetown, Trinity-Bellwoods, the Annex, Leaside) have the most species variety. A 30–45 minute walk in any of these should clear most of the card. The Oakwood cherry walk is well-stocked for the cherry-and-magnolia subset; the Rosedale veterans walk for the oak-and-elm subset.
Hard card: for the rarities, you'll want to target specific blocks. The Roncesvalles rare-tree pilgrimage hits the pawpaw and several others. The Royal Botanical Gardens collection in Burlington is the cheat code. Edwards Gardens and the Toronto Botanical Garden both have substantial collections of less-common species in the same compact zone.
Beyond bingo
If single-species bingo gets too predictable, here are three escalations:
- Caterpillar bingo — only count species that support more than 100 native Lepidoptera species (the caterpillar-test post has the full ranking). Suddenly Norway maples don't count and you need oaks, cherries, willows, birches.
- Tree-veteran bingo — five trees of any species, each with trunk diameter over 60 cm. This rewards walking the older neighbourhoods where the mature canopy lives.
- Daily Treedle — for an indoor / transit version, the site runs a daily Toronto-tree guessing game: one real tree, six guesses, new puzzle every day. Six minutes a day, 365 days a year.
If you generate a card you particularly liked for your block, or invent a variant worth sharing, let me know — there's an issues tracker on the GitHub repo, and good ideas tend to make it onto the site.