Frolics

Frolics is a bingo machine from Bally Manufacturing Corporation, one of the most iconic names in coin-operated amusements. Bingo machines are flipperless, pinball-style games in which the player shoots balls onto a playfield of numbered trap holes, trying to complete lines on bingo-style cards displayed on the backglass. Bally was the dominant maker of this genre, and Frolics, model number 544, is a solid example of the form.

The playfield contains 25 trap holes, and the game is played against six cards, giving players multiple simultaneous chances to line up winning combinations. Two extra balls can be earned to improve a game in progress, and a carry-over feature lets the next game's "Super-Scores" start at the top, adding an incentive to keep playing. The game was designed by Don Hooker, with a Pageantry - Music theme dressing up the backglass and cabinet.

While the machine's exact production year is not recorded in the data here, Frolics belongs to the golden era of Bally bingos, and its combination of multi-card play, extra balls, and carry-over scoring shows how sophisticated these gambling-adjacent games had become. For collectors of bingo machines, Frolics is an appealing piece of Bally history.