baseball arrangeball

My friend semicolin was able to assist with the arrangeball light board and now the game is playing quite well.  You can read up on the rules in an earlier post, because right now I just want to show you how it plays with the lights all working!  I still do not know who made this game, as there are no company marks.

light board, back in and working great

Winners Circle! A Bally prototype arrangeball derby game, probably from 1974

I am incredibly excited to share photographs of this seemingly unknown Bally prototype game, Winners Circle!

The owner has graciously allowed me to post these photographs and video.

This is an arrangeball game with derby rules.  The remarkable thing is that it seems to have been made for potential USA markets.  I would like to get into the rules of the game, then review what is going on inside, and then I'd like to share context of why this is significant and what else was going on in the industry at the time.

Let's talk arrange ball machines! (and say hello to Base Ball)

I saw this machine on YJA and eventually it was reposted at a good enough price that I had to go for it.  I am delighted that it arrived unscathed.  I've used companies like Buyee and FromJapan to get machines from Japan to Canada and so far the shipping services have been amazing. (knock wood for good luck here)

In this post I want to look at what led us to arrangeball machines, and a bit more about this style of arrangeball in particular.

I am currently working on creating a list of all of the elecmeca arcade games made in Japan.  That is a somewhat loose category which includes the mechanical & electromechanical, and basically just think of any kind of non-videogame arcade machine that you'd never be able to play on an emulator.  Part of that push is cataloguing all of the token-based and prize-based pachi machines, which includes arrangeballs.

So here's an ask for everyone:  If you have access to an arrange ball machine, I am super interested in your taxation tags to help determine the date it was manufactured.  If your machine has any manufacturer information pointing to date or company,  maybe on components inside, that is useful too.  Please let me know!

Pre-ww2, around the late 1920s, the earliest pachinko-style machines wouldn't award anything.  If you got it in a winning hole an operator would release it from the rear and most likely hand you a prize.   Some of the earliest payout machines would pay out sen coins.  Some pachinko-style games in the 1930s would pay out confectionary items.  By far the most common, standard pachinko machines would pay out in more pachinko balls.

~1940 子供パチンコ 自動菓子販賣機 (Children's pachinko confectionery vending machine) by セイコー社 (Seiko)
This is a candy vending machine for kids where they will always get a prize.  There is no "out hole".  You will see that a missed ball always returns to the player.

game room updates

My friend lent me his extremely rare Power Roulette pachinko so I am temporarily retiring my other 70s pachinko for this one.
My regular 70s pachinko is fun but has no remarkable gimmicks.  This Power Roulette allows you to spin the roulette wheel if you can get a ball in the top center pocket.

Lion Arrangeball, Glory Ball Deluxe, Power Roulette

having owned a number of pachinkos over the years, it's safe to say that I vastly prefer the games with the mechanical shooter.


Please note that all of this is being done with safe social distancing, proper handwashing, gloves, and full masks!
I also got to borrow this cool little MiniBoy poker machine:

During this quarantine I picked up not one but TWO Pike's Peak machines.  The nicer one is above, but it was missing a bunch of the reset mechanisms.
The 2nd one I got was very rough, but had the mechanisms needed, and now I have a full working one and my friend has a project that he will be relatively easy for him to tackle.

This is what this one shelf is looking like now:

I even took time to add more artwork to the walls.  I mean, this is what is BEHIND the machines.  Yeah, running out of room.    New up?  Zarzon and Astro Invader marquees are stunning.   That giant Combat marquee is from Sega in 1969.  And that's a newly added Free Fall playfield on the wall, too.

A bunch more movement coming this summer.
Contact Master is sold and leaving soon.  My Smart Balls are out getting worked on.  and we are all eagerly awaiting arrival of Merry-Go-round and World's Series, which have been out for restoration.

Niche Collections: JC's Arrangeball & Challengeball machines

On my journey into researching Japanese machines it took me a while before I discovered Arrangeballs.  I was watching some Japanese youtuber visit a retro-gaming parlor ("Shōwa" era games) and paused the video, grabbed a screen snap, and had to ask, "What the heck is that on the wall behind him"?  It looked like a pachinko at first glance, but it had a row of numbers along the bottom, and didn't have a normal feeder tray.  What's going on here?

The machines turned out to be called Arrangeball, and outside of the background in a few retro parlor shots, I couldn't find much about them.  I eventually discovered a small fanbase for them outside of Japan and fell in what might be love, but probably was more accurately lust.

Instead of the traditional abstracted gambling currency of choice in Japan (pachinko balls,) these games worked on tokens.  It must have been unfortunate timing because legislative changes spelled their demise about a decade in.  After they passed however, integrated circuit machines saw the rise of pachislo machines, which also operated on tokens.   Coulda shoulda woulda, arrangeballs had their tiny moment in time.

It reminds me of the short window of American pinball machines that paid out coins.  They too lasted about a decade before being legislated out of existence.  The American gambling pinballs went on to have credit counters and evolved from there.  The innovations of arrangeball machines were mostly lost to time as the rise of solid state machines, spinning digital reels, and electric shooters would pave the way for the 1980s modern pachinko boom, and subsequently pachislo.  

Legislation would be repealed and elements of arrangeball would continue into the solid-state era, under the guise of arepachi machines, but their numbers pale in comparison to contemporary digipachi (deijipachi / デジパチ) machines, and even to the humble (yet delightful) hanemono machines.

Niche Collection 004: JC's Arrangeball & Challengeball machines

the basics
who: JC (pachitalk)
where: America
what: Japanese Arrangeball & Challengeball machines
when: "I started collecting them in 2010 or so"
how many:   "I have 7 left out of 20 or so different models I've owned over the years.  A handful of the models I imported myself and as far as I can tell, are the only copies in the U.S."

Taiyo electron "Full Throttle 2"

Glory Ball is back from repairs!

Yeah!  Back from my friend's shop, Glory Ball is back and playing great.  The game always had issues from the moment I got it, so this is the first time it is working perfectly.

glory will be mine!

This game is extremely obscure as best as I can tell.  I've never seen one quite like it.  Arrangeballs themselves are hard enough to come by, but variant game like this are even rarer.  So no way was I going to abandon it, and I'm grateful now it's fully operational.

Epoxy work

Tonight's task was redoing the epoxy on the front plastic on this Arrangeball.
It was cracked long before it got to me, but letting hundreds of hands on it at the show eventually busted the front again.  No worries, all better.  It's a constant debate about preservation vs play, but I kinda feel I'm not the right owner for something if it is so fragile it  can't be shared with the public