For: Biggest name in UK bingo, excellent software, very high guaranteed prize money on many games, up to £250,000 jackpot on every game

Against: Very busy, but has multiple bingo rooms

Gala Bingo launched their first online bingo website last year, which was operated for them by St. Minver. Unfortunately, they ran into problems, and Gala Bingo withdrew from the market in early 2006.

Bu now Gala Bingo are back online, this time with a bingo website run solely by themselves. We at Bingomaniacs have checked this new bingo site out, and we have to say that we are very impressed with it! Gala have paid great attention to detail, and the new site looks great, as do the games!

Signing up to the new Gala Bingo website is simple. If you already play bingo at Gala clubs, you can save yourself the hassle of filling out a form by simply entering your membership number, which will bring up all your details automatically. Even if you have never set foot in a Gala Bingo club before, it is easy to fill out their online form to join the online bingo fun! Before you play, you have to deposit money of course, but the minimum deposit is only a fiver.

Gala Bingo has already become very busy, and so they are currently opening some more online halls. after all, there are sometimes over 1,000 players on any one game at a time!

Gala Bingo have developed their own online bingo interface, and as the market leader in UK bingo, we can safely say that they have done a good job. On logging in, you're given a choice of exactly how you want your bingo games to be. You can choose best card or best strip sorting, the colours that your cards go as you get nearer to winning, and your style of marking your cards. The game can be as automatic or as manual as you like. One of the features we particularly liked is the way that when you get down to one number for a win, the number you are waiting for starts to sparkle!

Gala bingo online is very busy, having been promoted heavily in its clubs, and on television with Sharon Osbourne as the 'face' of Gala Bingo online. There is a choice of several different rooms that you can play bingo in, all of which are at different levels of business. This is great, as you can choose between a quieter room where you have more of a chance of winning, or a busy room which will have much better prize money.

You can also create your own, unique identity on the Gala Bingo website. If you've ever wanted to be Sid James, Lily Savage or Cleopatra, now's your big chance! It's daft, but it's all good fun.

The new Gala Bingo website features a mature female caller. She sounds a little stern, but calls well. The games seem to be called a little faster than on other online bingo sites, but anyone used to playing bingo in a bingo club shouldn't find it hard to keep up, and id you do find it difficult, you can always select the auto-daub option.

The Gala bingo site offers a wide variety of bingo games, costing from five pence to fifty pence a ticket. These are clearly listed on the website if you want to avoid the more expensive games, although naturally these ones are the games with the best prize money. Some games have special jackpots or minimum prizes on their full houses of up to £1000. Best of all, Gala offer their players an exclusive Cash Climber jackpot, which can be won on any game, providing that you get the full house in 35 numbers or less. One person has already won on this, taking a record breaking £160,000 away, which beats the previous highest win on a bingo site by thousands of pounds!

We are very impressed with the new Gala Bingo website, and we are sure that it will do very well indeed. It's very user friendly and great fun to play on.