Shop till you drop — Williams’ C.O.D. is an electromechanical single-player wrapped in a playful theme of glamour and shopping, designed by the pioneering Harry Williams, a genuine giant of early pinball, with art by George Molentin. With light-based scoring, it’s a woodrail-era artifact from a founding master of the craft, with a genuinely unusual layout.
The layout has a distinctive helping of hardware: three flippers, an automatic flipper, two pop bumpers, a passive bumper, five kick-out holes, and five trap holes. That combination of an automatic flipper and a whopping ten holes — five kick-out and five trap — is the machine’s defining character, giving the playfield an enormous field of captured-ball awards to chase, while the automatic flipper adds a genuinely unusual mechanical wrinkle rarely seen in games of the era. It’s a hole-heavy, experimental design typical of pinball’s formative years, rewarding a player who works the whole playfield to find and feed all those holes.
C.O.D. is a lovely piece of history for the collector who cherishes the deepest roots of the hobby and the legendary figures who planted them. Harry Williams was a genuine visionary whose innovations helped invent the modern flipper game, and that automatic flipper and ten-hole layout make for a genuinely distinctive, experimental play. The glamour-and-shopping theme was a light, breezy choice with real period charm. For anyone who loves the golden age of EM pinball and its founding masters, it’s a worthy find. Work those ten holes, watch that automatic flipper, and shop till you drop. Some machines stand out for an unusual layout, and this Harry Williams classic is one of them. Charge it and drop a coin.