the teeny tiny table games

There's 10 of them now.  10!

How did this happen?  A Redgrave bagatelle had been on my wantlist for a while.  Then shortly after I discovered an auction in the UK for a scaled-down bar billiards table at a good price, and I had to go for it.  I do not think that the Singer bagatelle will be sticking around.

For the sake of discussing them, I will number them.  Tables number 1, 2, 5, 6, and 10 are all miniature / toy versions of tables that are regularly full-sized, usually 7-10 feet in length.  Tables 3, 4, 7, 8 and 9 are all made for the home parlor / toy market.

1. Cockamaroo: Seems to have began early 1800s.  Left and right shooter lane, and uses a cue or mace for both.  Place a King Ball at the top dot, and then there are 6 cups to land in on the way down, plus scoring columns along the bottom.
2. Pin bagatelle with plunger, first seen mid 1800s.  An example of how bells were introduced into the game.  Dual shooting lanes, with one for the plunger, one for shooting with a cue.  There is no King Ball spot here.
3. 1876 Redgrave bagatelle.  First USA patented coiled spring plunger from the front of the table, the way we now know with contemporary pinball.
4. Singer bagatelle: different style of plunger to avoid Redgrave's patent.  This has scoring slots along the bottom, a remnant from cockamaroo that would disappear by the 20th century.
5. 9-hole English bagatelle:  the classic English Bagatelle layout, 1 center cup encircled by 8 others.  Still played within some parts of the UK and USA.
6. Japanese rolling ball table: by 1870 there were variants of the English Bagetelle table sold that had cups in multiple lines.  In Japan, early meiji era, tables like this were used for ball rolling, and points exchanged for prizes.  This is the birth of modern redemption arcades.
7. Japanese rolling ball toy:  After the success of Japanese Rolling Ball in the USA, toy versions were sold from the 1900s to 1950s, though only some models had references to the Japanese origin.
8. Poolette: post-ww2 bagatelle toy from Japan, similar to Corinthian tables popular in the early 30s
9. 20th century bagatelle toy from the UK.  Corinthian style board, but with springed plunger and bakelite (maybe) plastic surface.
10. Bar Billiards: supposed "arriving from the Dutch" in the 1930s, bar billiards is still popular in parts of the UK today, as well as in a few other countries.  Sometimes referred to as "Russian Billiards", the game has under-table troughs to bring sunk balls to the labeled point slots at the front.

The tamakorogashi book is out! ものと人間の文化史 188 玉ころがし by 杉山 一夫 (Cultural History of Things and Humans 188 Rolling Balls by Kazuo Sugiyama)

Look what arrived today!  Last year I spent many long hours as a research assistant for this book and I'm excited to get my hands on it.

Cultural History of Things and Humans 188 Rolling Balls by Kazuo Sugiyama

The cover overlay features a graphic taken from a "Japanese Ball Game" I purchased, and paid to have digitally restored:

go to the tamakorogashi article for more details!

The book is published by Hosei University Press [ISBN978-4-588-21881-1] and is 370 pages of pre-arcade history for all of the Meiji-era fans in your life. :)

My central thesis around Japanese Rolling Ball was that it was the central ancestor of modern day redemption arcades.  It directly evolved into Fascination and Pokerino as electricity became available, seems to have inspired the invention of skee-ball, and was used as inspiration for a new type of carnival barker game.

Documenting the birth of the earliest redemption arcade models is, for me, the most important achievement of this research.

Available for purchase at Amazon Japan, Honto, Rakuten, and other places.

Hey it's me!
This is now the 2nd book from Japan with my name in it :)
But this time my name appears a few more times, and the research I did is spread out through the entire book.

assembling the bite-sized bagatelles

 coming to a pinball history booth near you.... someday...

banana for size

Left to right:

1. Singer parlor bagatelle (spring-loaded plunger shooter, but it's missing)
2. Poolette (small cue to launch balls)
3. French bagatelle / cockamaroo (balls launched from left/right troughs using a cue)
4. 9-hole English bagatelle (balls hit with mace or cue)
5. Japanese Rolling Ball (balls rolled by hand)

Nikkei Voice article on Tamakorogashi

I am happy to announce I have an article published in the Nikkei Voice newspaper.  It is available in their print edition, as well as online:

ARCADE ORIGINS IN THE JAPANESE ROLLING BALL: HOW TAMAKOROGASHI SHAPED THE WORLD OF MODERN GAMING

Nikkei Voice print edition

Nikkei Voice print edition

archived copy

Nikkei Voice framed at the Birth Of Pachinko Museum

on naming the bagatelles

It is hard to definitively understand the world of billiard variants.  The game(s) travelled the world many times over, some names were only used in certain regions, some regional-sounding names were given with little-to-no connection to those territories, and many times historical sources would naively swap names around.

This is another work-in-progress post where I'm going to try and collect some details, but I propose a singular takeaway: LET'S STOP CALLING THINGS "BAGATELLE".  Please?  Bagatelle is a toy home pinball game, it's a musical number, it's a literal TRIFLE synonym, it's a billiard board, it's an antique pin board, it's enough things.   Let's be more specific.

Quick summary of the styles I'm interested in:

9-hole bagatelle / English Bagatelle:  long and thin tables where you shoot from one end to pocket balls in the 9 shallow holes on the playfield.  These tables come up for sale somewhat regularly in the UK, and the folding versions come up occasionally in USA.  You don't often see it referenced as "9-hole bagatelle" but I am calling it that because it's explicitly descriptive.
My entry on 9-hole English bagatelle

Pin Bagatelle / French bagatelle / Parisian bagatelle / Russian Bagatelle / cockamaroo: a slanted table where balls are shot up a channel and then fall down through pins/pegs.  Full-sized tables of this type seem to be very rare / obscure, with smaller toy-sized versions being rather common.  Features like shooting method, playfield gimmicks, and score holes vary, and I use "pin bagatelle" as an overarching category covering these variants.
My entry on pin bagatelle / French bagatelle

Klondike Pool / Tivoli Table / American Bagatelle / Manhattan: very similar to other pin bagatelles, except it employs a holes and a trough system to delivery the balls to the front.  Pretty obscure, but at least some copies are known to exist.  Late 19th century, and primarily American.
My entry on pin bagatelles includes a section on Klondike Pool

Japanese Rolling Ball / Tamakorogashi (玉ころがし) / Billard Japonais / Japanese Billiards: a long table like 9-hole bagatelle, but with holes arranged in rows and given a larger range of point values.  Typically the end of the table is rounded, but sometimes it is rectangular.  No cue is used, balls are rolled by hand.  Many home-made ones exist due to their ease of construction, especially in parts of Europe where it still has popularity as a fair game.
My entry on Japanese Rolling Ball

Pigeon Hole / Trou Madam / Parepa:  has holes to shoot through at one end.  Many 9-hole tables also had an add-on to make it a pigeon-hole table.  Dedicated tables of this type are very rare / obscure, especially the angled Parepa tables.  Pigeon-hole is more often played on English Bagatelle tables by inserting a wooden bridge.
The dedicated Pigeon Hole tables have a trough under the playfield that returns the balls to the front of the table, same as bar billiards.

My entry on pigeon hole / trou madam / bar billiards

1872 J. M. Brunswick catalog

1872 J. M. Brunswick catalog

Most billiard tables can be converted to a table like this by adding a wooden arch made to fit across the narrow cross-section of the playfield.  The game Trou Madam, dating to the 16th century, can have arches like this, and games like Mississippi are played in this manner.

Carombolette:  a variant of pigeon-hole that adds a pin-bagatelle feature on the other side of the gates.  These are very rare / obscure.  The stopper pictured below would allow the table to be played purely as a pigeon hole table.
My entry on carombolette

Bar billiards / Jenny Lind / Russian Billiards: Balls are shot from the front and into holes which channel the balls back to the front of the table.  Played with "skittles" (wooden pieces) on the playfield to avoid.  Common, still made and played today.
My entry on bar billiards
some videos on bar billiards

Jenny Lind Table - holes in the table direct balls to trough at the front
1872 J. M. Brunswick catalog 

Some other table games:

Toupie Hollandaise: no strong connection to billiards or bagatelle, but I'm including because people often lump these in with antique bagatelles.  It has skittles on a flat playfield, to be knocked over by a spinning top.  Also exists as a children's versions.
My entry on Toupie Hollandaise

Bowling Naco:  balls are rolled down and their angle modified by changing the shooter's angle.  Exists as a large parlor game, very popular in children's toys, and also exists as coin-op games.  Including here because it was made into a coin-op game in the 1930s around the time when pin bagatelle went coin-op too.

new art! Gift from Kazuo Sugiyama

I am so incredibly excited to have received a gift from Kazuo Sugiyama, who before he began researching pachinko's origins and opening the Birth Of Pachinko Museum, is a print-maker artist.

the print is now on the wall

I have so much art on the walls throughout my house, but I did have this perfect space ready for it.  (It hangs just below another print, one by Eye Yamataka and signed by members of his band The Boredoms.)

Kazuo Sugiyama and the print!

I am very grateful to receive this.  It arrived safely from Japan.

the print is based off a scene from the 1962 movie キューポラのある街 (Foundry Town), and you can see more of that in my post on Pachinko in Japanese Cinema.

The print was used in Sugiyama's book パチンコ誕生―シネマの世紀の大衆娯楽 (Birth of Pachinko - Entertainment in the Century of Cinema)

9-hole bagatelle notes

This is another work-in-progress post so I can keep a visual log of the different bagatelle styles and bits of information I find.   The "history of pinball" didn't start here.  Bagatelle was just another note in the history of aristocratic gaming that goes back hundreds and thousands of years throughout humanity.  But this is a good jumping off point because around the time of bagatelle is when international trading really picked up the pace, and we can start tracing cultural exchanges from countries around the globe.

There are a few general styles:  The most common is the style of bagatelle that also became "Japanese Rolling Ball" (with a few differences,) where you have an arrangement of 9 pockets at one end.  Board is not slanted.  It is flat like a billiards table.  These all seems to be European here, and would be played with a cue with a mace (cue with a paddle on the end,) or with a traditional-style pool cue.

The main difference of Japanese Rolling Ball is that the balls would be rolled by hand.  And the few examples I've seen have 10 holes arranged more in a grid fashion.

A few here have an accessory to add gates to the playfield.  These variants will be lumped in here.  It wouldn't take much to convert a table like this in to a Pigeon Hole table.

The game from here went in a few branches.  Extra holes added at the ends.  Holes that led to troughs for scoring.  Playfield obstacles added.  Loose pins added to the playfield.  Fixed pins added to the playfield.

What truly marks the beginning of innovation that would lead to modern pinball is when they decided to slant the playing field.  We will get to those in a second posts.

1860 9-hole English bagatelle as seen at Pinball Expo 2024

For now, let's look at pretty bagatelle pictures:

Tamakorogashi - Japanese Roll Ball - 玉ころがし

Here I have gathered everything I can find about 玉ころがし (Tamakorogashi or Tama Korogashi) aka Japanese Roll Ball, or Japanese Rolling Ball, or Japan Rolling Balls, Billard Japonais, etc.  Obviously in Japan it would just be called "ball rolling".

picture from Jost & Cie catalog (see France section)

I am told by Mr. Sugiyama that Tamakorogashi was very popular in Japan from 1880-1930, but very little documentation of it exists outside of newspapers.  Game were not considered important back then, and photography still very expensive.  I am hoping that more and more details will emerge, especially documentation of the game within Japan.

We know quite a bit about games from 1930 onward.  We have some scraps detailing the history of bagatelle from the 18th and 19th centuries, but there is a lot to be learned about the role of Japanese game history in that time.
Building on our current lineage, billiards gave us bagatelle which through many twists and turns eventually gave us all of the arcade machines we know and love.  But the lines between 16th century billiards, 1780 France and the 1930s which gave birth to both pinball in America and pachinko in Japan are still poorly defined.  Tamakorogashi is a part of that developmental history, and it feeds back in to arcade history in a significant way.

Quick overview:

1880-1930 Tamakorogashi popular in Japan.
1901-1920s Japanese Rolling Ball gains popularity in USA and Canada.

1906-1950: Japanese Rolling Ball as a popular kids' toy.
1920s variations of Japanese Rolling Ball tables appear around Europe, at fairs and as part of their robust lineage of wooden table games. Names like "Le Billard Japonais" provide the only connection to its heritage.

1930s Japanese Rolling Ball slowly fades from USA amusement parks but inspires new arcade games, and the redemption model it pioneered thrives.

Gameplay:  balls are rolled down a long playfield towards numbered holes at the end of the playfield.  Depending on the total score, you would be awarded a prize of varied value.
Many establishments kept ledgers, allowing players to build on a score to cash it in for larger prizes.  Some places eventually offered tickets for players to track their score.

Legacy: Japanese Rolling Ball might be the very first "redemption arcade" game.  Ledgers were kept for players to exchange for larger prizes at the end of the season.  It was often used as a way to procure imported Japanese wares before import stores were common.  It was (usually) deemed a fair carnival game and not a scam (like many other carnival games,) and many players primarily enjoyed the gameplay.  

We have examples of points being accumulated and stored on ledgers in North America as early as 1906.  This "redemption arcade" template would later be duplicated by arcades for Skee-ball, Fascination, Pokerino, and all the way up to modern contemporary redemption arcades which dominate the industry worldwide.

Many arcade games took inspiration from tamakorogashi gameplay, some of which can be found at carnivals and arcades today.  Outside of the arcade, it was seen extensively in small community fairs and bazaars, and became a popular children's toy.

Name variants: Japanese Rolling Ball, Japanese Roll Ball, Tamakorogashi, Tama Koro, たまころがし, Japanese Ping-Pong, Japanese Bowling, Japanese Rolling Balls, Japanese Rolling Board, Japanese Ball Game, Japanese hand-bowling.
Each instance of 'Japanese' is sometimes shorted to just 'Jap' in old parlance.  In parts of Europe it was called "Japanese Billiards" or "Billard Japonais".

Game variants:  "Japanese Roll-Down" was a game made by American carnival workers to play off the popularity of Japanese Rolling Ball.  6 balls were simultaneously rolled down the playfield towards a 6x6 grid.  While Japanese Rolling Ball was seen as a fair game of skill, the Japanese Roll-Down was a scam carnival game.  It appeared as early as 1910.  (more details below in the Japanese Roll-Down section, and see also the section Beyond Japanese Rolling Ball)