Combination Recreation Board

The Combination Recreation Board is a circa early-1900s cue-game conversion kit produced by H. P. Schafer of Peoria, Illinois. Rather than a self-contained pinball cabinet, it is a board placed at one end of a billiard table to convert the table into a carombolette-style game — one of several similar conversion boards made by multiple manufacturers during this period.

The board features 62 trap holes and measures 50 inches by 30 1/4 inches. The holes are marked to allow players to choose between Poker, Keno, or Baseball scoring, blending card-game and sports themes into a single device. IPDB lists it as a 2-player game on the assumption that billiard tables are typically used by two people, though no specific rules limiting player count have been documented.

Little else is known about this piece, including any specific designer beyond the H. P. Schafer manufacturer credit. As one of several such conversion boards produced by different companies in the early 1900s, it offers a glimpse into an era when billiard-table add-ons blended with early trap-hole scoring devices.