The caller/dealer calls the randomly generated number/cue one at a time. The players mark off the numbers on their tickets as the numbers are called by a caller. The winner being the first person to mark off all their numbers of a winning combination.

The Tambola ticket or card has 3 horizontal rows/lines and 9 vertical columns with a total of 27 boxes. Each line has 5 numbers on it and four boxes are left blank. Thus a ticket has a total on 15 numbers. The first vertical column can have numbers from 1 to 9, the second column from 11 to 19, the third column from 21 to 29, and so on and the last column can have numbers from 81 to 90.