Grub Stake

Grub Stake, manufactured by L. B. Elliott Products Company of Chicago in August 1936, is a single-player electro-mechanical payout machine from the heart of the Depression-era coin-op boom. Its evocative name — a 'grubstake' being the money advanced to a prospector in exchange for a share of his findings — fits its nature as a gambling-style game where a lucky ball could return real winnings.

Elliott was one of the many short-lived Chicago coin-op manufacturers of the 1930s, active only from 1935 to 1937, and Grub Stake is among the handful of games the company produced before disappearing from the trade. As a payout machine, it belongs to the category that drew both players and legal controversy in the 1930s, when the line between amusement and gambling device was hotly contested.

IPDB records no designer, production figures, or playfield details for Grub Stake, and little else is known about it. That very obscurity — a payout game from a fleeting mid-1930s Chicago maker — is what gives it its interest to historians and collectors of pre-war coin-op machines.