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Reworded to describe these as table-top amusements in the ordinary sense — the parlour games they descended from — and footnoted the descent.

description

Pinball's earliest ancestors were purely mechanical devices — no electricity, no electronics, just gravity, springs, and pins. Descended from the 18th-century French parlor game of [[game-format:bagatelle]], these [[cabinet:tabletop]]table-top amusements invited players to launch a ball up an inclined playfield and watch it careen among brass pins into scoring pockets below.^[1] There were no [[gameplay-feature:flippers]], no bumpers, no bells — chance ruled almost completely. The machines that appeared in American penny arcades during the 1920s and early 1930s were simple affairs: a spring-loaded plunger, a sloped playfield studded with pins, and a handful of numbered scoring holes. Their simplicity made them cheap to build and easy to understand, and their randomness made them easy to condemn — several American cities banned them outright as gambling devices, a stigma the industry spent decades trying to escape. This era established pinball's physical vocabulary: the plunger, the pin-studded playfield, the glass-topped wooden cabinet. Every element that would evolve and elaborate over the following century was already present in embryonic form.

1.

Encyclopedia.com — https://www.encyclopedia.com/sports-and-everyday-life/games/games-and-hobbies/pinball

Pinball developed out of a marble game popular in France during the reign of Louis XIV. The French game was called Bagatelle [...] Players scored if their ball dropped into a hole, though the ball had to negotiate nails driven into the board as obstacles.

description

Pinball's earliest ancestors were purely mechanical devices — no electricity, no electronics, just gravity, springs, and pins. Descended from the 18th-century French parlor game of [[game-format:bagatelle]], these [[cabinet:tabletop]] amusements invited players to launch a ball up an inclined playfield and watch it careen among brass pins into scoring pockets below. There were no [[gameplay-feature:flippers]], no bumpers, no bells — chance ruled almost completely. The machines that appeared in American penny arcades during the 1920s and early 1930s were simple affairs: a spring-loaded plunger, a sloped playfield studded with pins, and a handful of numbered scoring holes. Their simplicity made them cheap to build and easy to understand, and their randomness made them easy to condemn — several American cities banned them outright as gambling devices, a stigma the industry spent decades trying to escape. This era established pinball's physical vocabulary: the plunger, the pin-studded playfield, the glass-topped wooden cabinet. Every element that would evolve and elaborate over the following century was already present in embryonic form.

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Pure Mechanical

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pure-mechanical