Krillion Recorded answers
196 recorded answers
How to approach it
Work by venue and by verb at the same time. Picture settings where you have stood and paid something small: a station platform, a shopping arcade, a launderette, a campsite shower block, a roadside stop, a pub with a back room. In each, ask what the coin actually released — a lock, a timer, a motor, a light, a portion. That question produces the mechanism rather than the object, and the mechanism is what you then dress in nouns. Keep wording at the level of function, since descriptions outscore trademarks. Then deliberately widen past entertainment into utility, comfort and retail, and finally into the obsolete: anything retired, regional or slightly absurd is fair game and usually rarer than the obvious choice.
Get a hint
Fix the shape of the target first: a small payment buys a slice of time or a measured portion, and from there the device works on its own.
A little more
Add function verbs one at a time — dispensing, timing, weighing, washing, heating, lighting, moving, playing, photographing — and let each verb suggest a different apparatus.
One step further
Push into the retired and the peculiar: fairground novelties, one-off contraptions and devices whose slot has since been swapped for a card reader all count.
Reveal answers 196
- Coin-operated showerRare60points
- Coin-operated turnstileRare60points
- CoinstarRare60points
- Condom machineRare60points
- Detergent vending machineRare60points
- FareboxRare60points
- Foosball tableRare60points
- Fortune teller machineRare60points
- Ice cream vending machineRare60points
- Ice vending machineRare60points
- Massage chairRare60points
- Newspaper vending boxRare60points
- Pachinko machineRare60points
- Pay toiletRare60points
- Pay-and-display machineRare60points
- Penny arcade machineRare60points
- Penny pressRare60points
- Pool tableRare60points
- Shooting galleryRare60points
- Skee-BallRare60points
- Sticker vending machineRare60points
- Strength testerRare60points
- Tampon machineRare60points
- Ticket vending machineRare60points
- Toll machineRare60points
- Trading card vending machineRare60points
- Video poker machineRare60points
- Water vending machineRare60points
- Air hockey tableSchooler30points
- Candy machineSchooler30points
- Claw machineSchooler30points
- Coin-operated dryerSchooler30points
- Coin-operated washing machineSchooler30points
- Gumball machineSchooler30points
- JukeboxSchooler30points
- Kiddie rideSchooler30points
- Parking meterSchooler30points
- PayphoneSchooler30points
- Photo boothSchooler30points
- Pinball machineSchooler30points
- Snack machineSchooler30points
- Soda machineSchooler30points
- Whac-A-MoleSchooler30points
- Arcade machinePlankton10points
- Slot machinePlankton10points
- Vending machinePlankton10points
Why these answers count
Almost two hundred entries were accepted, so the point spread measures inventiveness far more than correctness. The lone 100-point entry was a named novelty device made on the spot at a single attraction, so particular that virtually nobody else could have landed on the same wording. The wide 85-point band sits in the productive middle: utility variants, timed appliances, devices releasing very specific goods, coin-activated services attached to odd venues. Each describes something verifiable and unmistakable, yet few enough players thought of it that duplication stayed rare. The 60-point group rewards the answers that arrive first — the famous entertainments and the widely known service machines that hundreds of people type within the same minute. Nothing about those is wrong; they are simply common, and popularity is exactly what the scoring penalises. The practical lesson is that specificity and mild strangeness beat fame: a retired, regional or oddly narrow device separates you from the crowd, while the household-name example only confirms what everyone already wrote.