One is never too young to sample the forbidden delights of gambling, which is what Coastal Amusements thought when they introduced their Pop-a-ball game to arcades and seaside boardwalks.

The game was a combination of poker and bingo requiring both luck and skill at picking a winning hand. Brightly colored cabinet housed a video screen and a playfield, the former arranged as a 5x5 grid with holes. Each hole represented a playing card ranging from 9's to Aces in each suit--2's through 8's were omitted.

One coin allowed the player to pop up five balls that eventually came to rest on a random hole on the grid, spelling out a poker hand that appeared on the video screen. Per the rules of 5-card draw, the player could keep the strongest cards and re-pop the remaining balls, resulting in the final hand. Sometimes balls would stray from the playing grid, prompting one of the machines speech effects like "Sorry!" and the lost balls would re-pop.

The best hands like a full house or four of a kind earned you the most tickets or you could slowly accumulate tickets one pair of aces at a time. The cabinet include a glass display full of prizes to claim with your rolls and rolls of tickets (if you were lucky).

There was also a Pop-a-Tac-Toe version for younger players that took out the poker elements altogether, featuring instead a more innocent Tic-Tac-Toe grid. In that game, bonus tickets were awarded if you (or rather, the ball popper) managed to cover all corners with the four balls in play.