Fascination: Antique Skee-ball meets Bingo
Games are ubiquitous with traveling carnivals, amusement parks, and theme parks. Some more well known such as Skee-ball, whack-a-mole, and cat rack, and others relatively obscure. Today’s subject is a more rare game called Fascination.
Imagine a game similar to Skee-ball but played sitting down and on a smaller scale. Players roll balls up a slightly inclined ramp onto a playing field which consists of 25 holes arranged in a 5 by 5 grid. Directly perpendicular to the playing field at the far end is an upright board of 25 lights arranged in the same pattern. As you roll balls onto the playing field, they settle into one of the 25 holes on the playing field and fall through it. A light on the upright board then illuminates corresponding to whichever hold your ball went into. The balls then roll down under the playing field and return back to the players to roll again. The object of the game is to get 5 lights illuminated on the same row be it horizontally, vertically, or diagonally.
The game is played in Fascination parlors where dozens of machines are lined up and linked together with technology used in old operator boards. Antique electrical relays that allow for coordination of each individual fascination game and control by the game’s operators. Just like in Bingo where the first player to reach Bingo wins, the first player to alight 5 lines in the same row wins. Sometimes though alternate win conditions are played such as 4 corners, coverall (alight all 25 lights), or only a specific line on the board counts. The fun of the game is racing all of the other players to the win condition.
Things can get hilariously competitive, for example, when 5 players only need 1 more light to win but none of them can seem to make it. The game is an example of the old adage “easy to learn, difficult to master”. There is both luck and skill involved. The lanes you roll your ball down are not perfectly flat to add to the challenge. There’s about 2 feet of a slightly inclined ramp to roll your ball up, at which point a slight bump separates the lane from where the scoring holes are. The area with the holes is flat but bowl shaped on the ends past the holes. It’s not difficult to roll a ball into any given hole, but much more difficult to get your ball to roll into a specific hole.
I first played this game at Indiana Beach in 2023. We arrived at the park early and none of the rides were operating yet so we had time to kill. I’m glad we did because it was a ton of fun to play. I’ve also played at the Fascination parlor at Knoebels in Pennsylvania. Part of the fall ACE meet up at Knoebels includes a Fascination tournament where every single game is being played. It’s always so much fun having people call out how close players are to winning, with the operator cheering everyone on and keeping the energy high. It is an underrated highlight of the year and should be experienced at least once by everyone, if not every year.
Unfortunately, there are not many other places remaining where you can play. The remaining active locations are:
Long Beach, CA,
Wildwood, NJ,
Six Flags Darien Lake, NY
Sylvan Beach Amusement Park, NY
Geneva Township, OH,
Seaside, OR.
Wikipedia confusingly sates both that the game is first dated to 1918 Coney Island, NY, but that is was also invented in Salt Lake City by John Taylor Gibbs who then moved to southern California. The game was popular on pleasure piers, beach cities, and in amusement parks throughout the US, but steadily declined like all amusement parks in the first half of the 1900’s due to the combination of The Great Depression and World War 2. The Good News is that preservation seems to be going well of the remaining active sites you can play.
Tom Scott did a video on Fascination in 2019 although the building which hosted this parlor was destroyed by a storm the same year, Tom put in the video’s description that apparently the Fascination machines themselves were saved and are in storage.
Is there a random obscure old timey carnival game I should cover? Let me know in an email to bumpersky@gmail.com!
Thank you for reading! I highly suggest you make a Fascination parlor part of your amusement park plans this summer. Or if not Fascination, at least cat rack.
