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The Last Play-For-Cash Fascination Parlor

Tom Scott | January 8, 2026



UPDATE: In 2019, the Fascination Parlor was hit by storms, and the building didn’t survive. The games have been stored, and hopefully it’ll reopen somewhere at some point! • On Nantasket Beach in the seaside town of Hull, Massachusetts, sits the last play-for-cash Fascination Parlor in the world. It’s a century-old arcade game, made of relays that click and buzz. There are a few other parlors left in the world: but this is the only one where you’re playing for actual money.

More about the Paragon Boardwalk: https://www.paragonboardwalk.com/

Edited by Michelle Martin https://www.youtube.com/@OnTheCrux

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Written by Tom Scott

Comments

This post currently has 31 comments.

  1. @TomScottGo

    January 8, 2026 at 4:22 am

    UPDATE: In 2019, the Fascination Parlor was hit by storms, and the building didn't survive. The games have been stored, and hopefully it'll reopen somewhere at some point!

  2. @dazedandenthused8559

    January 8, 2026 at 4:22 am

    Technically the fascination parlor at Indiana Beach is still America's only operating location that still pays out, but it only does so a few times a year for special invitation only events so it's not really able to honestly take the claim, in a more general sense.

    It's too bad this place didn't survive the storm, my family has a few folks nearby and it looked like the kind of place I might've liked to hit up with them.

  3. @judesquier1391

    January 8, 2026 at 4:22 am

    There’s a Fascination in Seaside, Oregon and it’s a play to win points. You spend them in the arcade or in the parlour. It’s 25¢/play, and if you win, you get a 99pt coupon. I really love this game and strongly recommend it, even though there are few left in the U.S. It really is good-ol’-fashioned fun 😁😁👍

  4. @scotttaylor7146

    January 8, 2026 at 4:22 am

    I used to work the midway at a theme park, we had a similar game to this called Roll-A-Ball. Instead of bingo, it was a race between little racecars and getting the ball in certain holes made the car go faster. Winning a 12 player game (or beating a cumulative 10 other players over a number of games) got you the the 2 foot tall t-rex or whatever massive prizes were available.

    Same electronics and such though

  5. @hingedelephant

    January 8, 2026 at 4:22 am

    I worked on a Fascination Parlor as a maintenance technician at an amusement park in the 80s. All of the machines are interconnected. The holes have open contact fingers in them to detect a passing ball. Whe that happens, open contact relays associated with that hole are closed. When the right combination of relays is set for the pattern your playing, a win relay is activated which sets off the win alarm, lights up the winning table’s top light to show the winning table and the rest of the tables go dark. When this happens there’s a very satisfying “clack” heard throughout the parlor as all those set replays reset. All of these relays were open to the air, not sealed. The contacts on these relays needed frequent cleaning and replacing (all soldered in, no sockets). I don’t recall exactly, but each table had about 35 relays, a combination of 2 pole and 3 pole relays. The parlor had about 40 tables, as I recall. They were both a nightmare to keep working and yet a joy to work on. Fun to play, too.

  6. @MartinFinnerup

    January 8, 2026 at 4:22 am

    Technically Tom only lent him the dollar, so I guess he should have given back one of the bills.
    Then again, considering they went out of business, I guess they need every cent they could get. :/

  7. @dave900575

    January 8, 2026 at 4:22 am

    I appreciate all of your videos, but this one in particular. My folks would take my siblings and I to Nantasket Beach as kids. Paragon Park was an amusement park that closed in 1984. I remember that Fascination location well.

Comments are closed.




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