Beach Time

Beach Time is a bingo machine designed by Don Hooker for Bally Manufacturing Corporation, and with a confirmed production run of just 500 units, it is a genuinely scarce example of the genre. Like Bally's other bingos, it is a flipperless, card-based game: the player shoots balls into a field of 25 trap holes, trying to land numbers that complete winning lines on the backglass card.

What distinguishes Beach Time is its number-manipulation features. The game offers Magic Squares and two Magic Lines (E and F), and the Ballyhole lights features A through F for the next game. If the features have been purchased, the player can press buttons to rearrange numbers on the backglass card before shooting the fourth ball, before the fifth ball, or even after the fifth ball, adding a real layer of strategy to each game.

The theme is pure summer escapism, spanning beach, boating, swimming, and recreation. One footnote for restorers: although Bally's flyer shows Beach Time with wooden legs, its manual lists the part numbers for metal legs and their shorter bolts, the same parts later documented for Bally's 1958 Carnival Queen, the first Bally bingo advertised with metal legs.