Bowl-A-Line

Bowl-A-Line, released by Bally Manufacturing Corporation in 1972, is an electro-mechanical bingo machine -- a single-player pinball-adjacent game built around cards and trap holes rather than flippers and ramps. As with many bingo machines of the era, its straightforward mechanical layout belies a game of some subtlety, with scoring based on which trap holes the ball falls into and how those results align with the numbered card display.

Bowl-A-Line's true origin appears to be more interesting than its name suggests: it is probably a Bally 'Ticker Tape' machine fitted with a different, after-market backglass. This kind of rebadging was a known practice at the time, sometimes used to sidestep local ordinances that named specific games as illegal for operation -- if a title wasn't on an enforcement list, it could keep running under a new name.

Beyond this, little further detail survives about Bowl-A-Line specifically, but it stands as a good example of the improvised, and sometimes cat-and-mouse, relationship between bingo machine operators and local gambling regulations in the early 1970s.