Carombolette Table

The Carombolette Table is a rare, purely mechanical game combining elements of billiards, bagatelle, and pigeon-hole tables. No manufacturer's mark survives on the known examples, but documentation for similar games places their manufacture in the mid-to-late 1800s, making this genuinely one of the earlier table-game devices in the historical record, predating pinball as it's known today.

Gameplay involves shooting balls with cue sticks so they pass through nine arched pigeon holes into a scoring area equipped with three bells; there are no flippers, since the mechanism predates that invention by decades. Two documented examples vary somewhat in size and detail: one is roughly 8 feet long with a ball trough holding seventeen white balls and one red ball, while the other lacks a ball trough and instead stores eight white balls and one red ball, with slightly smaller ball diameters. Both use heavy, felt-covered slate playing surfaces.

Because no manufacturer or designer is documented, and only two examples are known via photographs, the Carombolette Table remains a fascinating but poorly documented artifact from the pre-electronic history of table games.