Mystic Lines

Mystic Lines is a feature of Bingo Pinball machines that mounts the numbers of the Bingo Cards on movable columns behind a metal panel painted with fixed colored sections. The center column shifts up or down as a Magic Lines line, and the pairs of columns flanking it swap with each other, letting the player gather lit numbers into a paying color group — the Magic Screen relationship inverted: the numbers move behind a stationary pattern instead of a screen moving over stationary numbers.^[1][2]

Scoring by sections

Mystic Lines games abandoned in-line scoring — the classic bingo win of lighting three or more adjacent numbers in a row — and made section scoring the only way to win: lit numbers in the same colored group pay whether or not they touch.^[3] The card is divided among four colors rather than the three of the Magic Screen games.^[4] And the scheme hid a trap: one number in each color was a white “star” that counted toward its color only as the fifth number — four lit blues plus the blue star paid 5-in-blue, but two blues plus the star paid nothing.^[5]

Origins

The first Mystic Lines game was Border Beauty (1965, Bally), which was also the first bingo built on a 20-hole playfield.^[6][7] The card shrank with it, to four rows by five columns, giving up five of the 25 Trap Holes every bingo before it had carried.^[2][4]