Magic Squares

Magic Squares is a backglass mechanism of Bally’s Bingo Pinball machines: blocks of four numbers on the game’s Bingo Cards are mounted on wheels behind the glass, and buttons on the cabinet’s foot rail turn each block a quarter-turn at a time, rearranging the card itself.^[1] A ball already resting in a numbered hole stays put while the card moves around it, so a player can rotate a near miss into a paying line after the shooting is done.^[1] The squares sat in the corners of the card at first, and players took to calling the feature “turning corners”.^[2]

Origins

The first Magic Squares game was Broadway (1955, Bally).^[3][4] Like most things on a bingo, the rotation ran on money: whether the buttons worked at all, and how deep into the game they stayed live, were features the player bought with additional coins.^[5][6]

The arms race

Magic Squares was one round in an arms race — through the 1950s Bally’s bingos grew steadily more elaborate, each new machine adding another way to work the card.^[7] It followed the moving numbers of Magic Lines, introduced on Variety (1954),^[8] and was answered in turn by the Magic Screen in 1958 and Mystic Lines in 1965. The wheels earned their keep for two decades — Bally was still building Magic Squares games as late as Bonanza (1976).