Bally Mystic Gate: It works and plays

It's been awhile since I last wrote about my Mystic Gate 20 hole bingo machine.

It's been working for some time now.

To get it working I had to:

Clean all the steppers, discs and wipers
Clean the mystic line units.
Clean the switch stacks of the shutter motor.
Clean the relays under the program unit that were covered in machine dirt and old oil.
Swapped all the 55 lamps for 47's and I changed all the 1464 lamps for the card.

Not much work really for a bingo machine. The game is relatively low mileage. The clutch washers were still lubricated and in good shape so I decided to leave them as is. After all, better is the enemy of good enough.

Mystic Gate is a pretty simple 20 hole bingo machine. No side game, no strange esoteric features. Juste the gate feature really. The game has a 40 coin limit. It doesnt have a proper mixer like the older bingos and I find that the setup with the Scrambler unit and the program unit takes away from the randomness of each spin cycle compared to my older games like Golden gate, Carnival Queen and surf club.

I had a few guests over in the last few weeks and they all find the Mystic Gate really fun.

I have to admit I also think the game is pretty fun despite being very simple. I think the gate is more of a gimmick. Sometimes it's useful sometimes, not so much.

How do you play the mystic lines?

Here is a fun game I played recently that nicely demonstrates how the mystic lines work.

In this game I had the A and B lines lit. The "Press buttons after 5th ball" and I had the "Any 4 stars score 300" that should read instead "All 4 stars score 300". I guess the Backglass Screening Department made a typo.

So After shooting my 5 balls I had a nice but useless grouping

11 in the blue
12 in the red
8 and 20 in the yellow and the 1 yellow star number

By itself this number combination was not a winner but by moving the A and B mystic lines...

I moved the A line up and down to have the 20 in the blue section.
I with the B mystic line, I switched the 2 left vertical columns of the card so that 8 and 1 are now in the blue section.

Lo and behold. 3 in blue. Luckily for me, the blue odds were all the way up and I scored a hefty 192 credits.

That's the beauty of the mystic lines.

The downside of the mystic lines is that the star numbers counts only as the 5th number in a color section. Two numbers in the same color section plus the star number of the same color pays nothing. Three numbers in the same color section plus the star number of the same color pays as a 3.

Mystic Gate does have the features "Any 3 stars score 25" and "All 4 stars score 300"

With one of those features lit, I guess the star numbers are a bit more useful.