Shuffle Skill

Shuffle Skill, manufactured by United Manufacturing Company of Chicago, is not actually a pinball machine — it is a 1-player puck bowler (shuffle alley) that uses a backglass styled to resemble a pinball machine's. It is included in pinball reference listings for clarification purposes, since its appearance can easily be mistaken for a pinball table.

As a shuffle alley, Shuffle Skill would have used a sliding-puck playing surface rather than a plunger-launched ball and flippers, with scoring determined by where the puck comes to rest, in the tradition of games like bowling or skee-ball rather than pin games.

Little further information about Shuffle Skill's specific rules or exact production date is available, but its existence is a useful reminder of how closely the design language of mid-century shuffle alleys and pinball machines could overlap, especially in their backglass artwork.