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- description
- Mystic Lines is a feature of [[game-format:bingo-pinball]] machines that mounts the numbers of the [[gameplay-feature:bingo-cards]] on movable columns behind a metal panel painted with fixed colored sections. The center column shifts up or down as a [[gameplay-feature: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 [[gameplay-feature: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 *[[title:border-beauty]]* (1965, [[manufacturer: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 [[gameplay-feature:trap-holes]] every bingo before it had carried.[2][4]
2. Bingo Pinballs — https://bingo.cdyn.com/machines/bally/beauty_beach The main card is 4x5 (four rows, five columns). The center column was a Magic Line - it could be moved up or down one position. The two columns on the left could be swapped with themselves, and so could the two columns on the right.
3. Bingo Pinballs — https://bingo.cdyn.com/machines/bally/beauty_beach First appearing on Border Beauty, this new game type took the section scoring idea from the magic screen games and got rid of the in-line scoring that had been on every bingo up until now.
5. Bingo Pinballs — https://bingo.cdyn.com/machines/bally/beauty_beach The nasty trick was that one number in each color group was white with a corresponding colored star. That number counted as the fifth number in the color only, otherwise it only counted as a lit star.
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- name
- Mystic Lines
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- mystic-lines
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- active