Circus Queen

The Circus Queen, designed by Don Hooker for Bally Manufacturing Corporation, is a bingo machine - the flipperless, card-based cousin of pinball that Bally specialized in during the 1950s and early 1960s. A 1961 Billboard article included in the machine's IPDB listing discusses how Bally was, at the time, beginning to vary from its standard procedure of producing only one game at a time.

Gameplay revolves around 25 trap holes and two rollover buttons: players shoot balls onto the playfield and try to land them in numbered holes that light spots on a card displayed in the backglass. The game features Bally's famous Magic Screen along with the OK Feature and a Blue bonus feature in which balls landing in the blue section score 300 or 600. If the relevant features are purchased, the player can press buttons to rearrange the numbers on the backglass card - before shooting the fourth ball, before shooting the fifth ball, or even after the fifth ball - adding a striking layer of strategy and replayability.

The Circus Queen's trapeze-themed circus/carnival artwork fits the playful gambling spirit of the bingo genre. As an example of Bally's bingo output at the turn of the 1960s, it offers a fascinating window into a side of the pinball industry that thrived alongside - and quite apart from - the flipper games of the era.