Magic Screen

The Magic Screen is a painted metal screen that slides in front of the Bingo Cards of a Bingo Pinball machine: the numbers on the card stay put while the screen moves across them, changing what pattern pays — an inversion of the card-moving features that came before it.^[1]

Scoring through the screen

In the screen’s home position the card scores conventional colored lines; sliding it left trades lines for irregular colored sections, and within a section lit numbers pay without needing to be adjacent at all.^[2][3][4] Striped “Super Sections” sweetened it further, scoring a section as one number better than the player actually had.^[5]

The screen made winning combinatorial, and finding the wins became the player’s own job. Screen games added an R-button to the machine: the game only scans for winners when it is pressed, and every new screen position needs a fresh press.^[6] A winning combination the player fails to find and score before starting the next game is simply lost.^[7]

Origins

The first Magic Screen game was Carnival Queen (1958, Bally), which also introduced the R-button.^[8][1][6] The screen games became a mainstay — bingo.cdyn.com, a collector archive devoted to the genre, rates them as probably the most popular style Bally made.^[9] The section-scoring idea outlived the screen itself: Mystic Lines machines kept the colored sections and dropped in-line scoring entirely.