Shuffle Bowl

Shuffle Bowl, manufactured by Exhibit Supply Company (ESCO) of Chicago and dated January 1950, is not a pinball machine but a coin-operated conversion kit. It was sold to operators to mount on one end of a standard non-coin, non-electric 22-foot regulation shuffleboard table, converting it into a coin-operated puck bowler.

The conversion consisted of a scoreboard, a gravity-feed puck return chute, a cash box, and score sheets, along with a set of illuminated, non-moving plastic bowling pins. Each pin would switch off individually as a puck slid beneath it and closed an electrical contact, simulating pins being knocked down. Play cost 10 cents per player, and the device supported up to five players.

Exhibit announced Shuffle Bowl in The Billboard on January 21, 1950, noting that installation took about two hours. A follow-up article the next month credited it as the first of the shuffleboard conversion games that helped revive interest in coin-operated shuffleboard play, making it a notable piece of amusement-industry history even though it was never a pinball machine in the conventional sense.