In-Line Scoring

In-line scoring is the way a Bingo Pinball machine pays: a win is three or more lit numbers standing adjacent along a row, a column or one of the two corner-to-corner diagonals of the 5x5 Bingo Cards, and the award climbs steeply with the length of the line — four in a row paid roughly four times what three did, and five paid 100 replays.^[1][2]

The method named the machines before the card did. When the Johnson Act closed interstate commerce to the One-Ball payout games, Bally answered with a five-ball design that asked the player to light a row of numbers in a grid printed on the Backglasses; the trade called these in-line games, and players, reading the grid for what it looked like, renamed them bingo pinballs.^[3][4][5]

Which line, not just how many

Early machines drew no distinction between one three-in-line and another.^[6] Painting the lines in colors changed that: with red, yellow and green carrying separate odds, three in red might pay 8 where three in green paid 64.^[7] That gap is the reason the card-moving features exist — a player holding a cheap winner can spend more coins on Magic Squares or Magic Lines and drag the same lit numbers into an expensive one.

The shape of a scoring line was not fixed either. The two long diagonals through the card counted on most machines, and where a machine allowed diagonals at all, any diagonal run of three or more scored; a few added extra short diagonals, and a few laid out cards of 3x6 or 4x6 holes that paid for six in a row.^[8][9]

Displacement

Section Scoring arrived beside in-line scoring rather than instead of it: on a Magic Screen machine the screen’s home position scores lines, and sliding it left trades them away for colored sections.^[10] The clean break came with Mystic Lines, from Border Beauty (1965, Bally), which took the section idea and dropped line scoring altogether.^[11]