Roulette Wheels

A roulette wheel is a turning disc set into the playfield and divided into marked segments, whose resting position decides what the player is awarded — the casino wheel borrowed as a scoring device, and fitted almost exclusively to machines themed on gambling.

Game Plan built its cocktail machines around one. On Real (1978) the wheel sits in the middle of the playfield and is set going by the machine’s kick-out holes, handing out random awards;^[1] Chuck-A-Luck (1978) is the same playfield with factory-applied stickers pasted over the original artwork,^[2] and Foxy Lady (1978) carries the wheel as well.

Where the wheel is stepped rather than spun it stops being a lottery. Segasa’s Casino Royale (1976) advances its wheel one position at a time from two targets at the top of the playfield, freezes it with a target at the lower left and cashes whatever value is showing through a kick-out hole — a value the player has spent the ball climbing.^[3] Bally took the other route on Speakeasy (1982) and hid the mechanism under the playfield, where the saucers on either side of mid-field set it going.^[4][5] That wheel scores points, but two of its segments deal in balls instead: one adds a ball to the game and one takes a ball away, and the backglass counts anywhere from two balls owed to nine in hand.^[6][7]