Williams’ Alien Poker, released in 1980 and designed by Edward Tomaszewski, is a wonderfully oddball mash-up — a high-stakes card game played against little green men, complete with speech that brings the extraterrestrial card sharks to life. A three-flipper solid-state table with a five-bank of drop targets and a spinner, it pairs a poker-and-aliens theme with the kind of clean, skill-rewarding design that makes early-80s Williams games so beloved.
The scoring revolves around chasing the Royal Flush. You boost the Royal Flush value by completing Kings up the top lanes, and knocking down the drop targets in order builds it to a hefty 400K maximum, while the blue target stacks your bonus multiplier. The spinner lights when the Royal Flush multiplier reaches 3X (and is best hit straight off the plunge), and in standard play collecting four Aces lights an extra ball. A nice control tip the table rewards: the upper-right flipper can be “staged,” caught and slowly released to feed the ball cleanly to the lower flipper.
Quirky, deep, and dripping with B-movie sci-fi charm, Alien Poker is a distinctive and fondly remembered Williams machine. For collectors who love an inventive theme and a satisfying drop-target-and-spinner game with a poker twist, it’s a genuinely fun classic — proof the house always wins, even in outer space.