WELLS, MINN.-- Swing by a small-town festival, and you might get a chance to play one of Minnesota's most creative forms of licensed charitable gambling: "cow plop bingo."

Instead of bingo cards and numbers, this game is played in a grassy field painted into squares and with just one important figure: number two.

The player who holds the ticket to the square littered by the bovine is the winner. And so are the folks in Wells, whose barnyard betting has been an official form of gambling since 2007.

"It's something different," laughed Andrea Neubauer, executive director of the Chamber of Commerce in Wells, west of Albert Lea, which last week held its fifth annual plop.

Different or not, it is still a game of chance, says the Minnesota Gambling Control Board. That means everyone who plays should have equal opportunity to win. Hence, the full page of rules and regulations for its official state name -- "Cow-a-bunga."

"I never thought I would see the day we had a cow pooping to determine a winning raffle entry," said Tom Barrett, executive director of the Gambling Control Board. "But it is Minnesota and we do what we can to have fun and still keep the game above board -- or in this case, on the grid!"

How it works

At the city park last weekend, Sue Bump staffed the Cow Plop Bingo raffle table during the annual Kernel Days celebration. As kids played volleyball and watched tractor races, she hawked the $5 tickets to folks strolling by.

The white tickets, complete with bar codes, offered a top prize of $250 and eight prizes of $30. About 300 tickets are sold each year, said Bump, a Roseville transplant whose previous experience with cows amounted to "touching one at the Anoka County Fair."

The sales booth shut down about 1 p.m. when a truck and trailer pulled up to the festival. The stars of the show, two freshly washed cows, emerged from the back and began munching on grass.

The pregame snack was designed to prevent a repeat of last year's game, when the cows failed to take any action after spending three hours on the grid.

Bored silly, "we basically had to draw names from a hat," Neubauer said.

After snack time, the cows -- plural cows because they keep each other calm -- were escorted to a grid divided into 300 squares surrounded by an orange plastic fence. A couple dozen folks, mainly visiting city slickers, watched with interest. And so the game began.

The cows munched on grass in the center of the grid. They took a step forward or back. They stared at the crowd. They chewed. The suspense was palpable.

"Come on over here: I'll rub your belly," yelled one of the onlookers with a smirk.

After about a half hour of this, the duty was done -- smack on a painted line. The judges rushed forward with a yard stick to determine which grid had the largest portion.

The first-place winner wasn't around to enjoy his victory. So the attention went to the second-place winners, people holding tickets to the squares adjacent to the plop, who took home $30. One of them eyed the winning square.

"Now I can go back home and tell everyone I took second place in Cow Plop Bingo" said Ken Harnack of Burnsville, who grew up in Wells.

But there apparently was real strategy involved in this win. Harnack's father Bill, had held his son's raffle ticket up toward one of the cow's faces as it grazed nearby, in an attempt at psychic influence. "And he looked right at it," he said.

Brother Keith appealed to the cows' sense of dignity. "I told them, 'It's OK. Don't be embarrassed. Just let it go,'" he joked.

By 2:30, all the winners were posted at Bump's table, and the cows were heading home.

Finicky creatures

Not all games go so smoothly. When nearby Kiester held its "cow chip bingo" earlier this summer, its featured guest bolted over the fence and lumbered out of town.

"Cows are funny that way," said Carol Rinehart, a member of the Kiester Civic and Commerce Association, which sponsored the event as part of Kiester Days.

A key problem with animals and gambling is the timing of the "action," said Rinehart. Once the Kiester crowd had to wait "well into the dark", she said.

That said, the cow pie gambling is the biggest fundraisers of the year for the Kiester association and the Wells chamber, which each cleared about $1,000.

"It's a great social event," said Rinehart. "We have regulars who come down for it. It's on Friday night and kicks off the whole weekend.

Variations of the game are played across the country, and clandestinely in Minnesota. An Internet search revealed moose poop bingo, turkey poop bingo, chicken poop bingo and more.

Just don't mess with those games in Minnesota. An application to hold a chicken poop raffle was denied by the Gambling Control Board in 2008. Why? Because the chicken would be restricted to a cage to make his deposit, while the cow is released in a more "natural environment," the control board wrote.

Gary Danger, compliance officer at the board, acknowledges the licensing decisions may seem odd to the public.

"You have to have a sense of humor," said Danger. "But if people are putting down their dollars, it [the gambling] has to be fair. There's a lot of ways to put a twist on old ideas."

Jean Hopfensperger • 612-673-4511