Pachinko is a mechanical game sort of like pinball, but vertical (that is, the balls fall down rather than shooting along on the flat) and with much smaller balls.

Also, it's a game of almost pure chance. With pinball, you can affect where the ball goes by using the flippers and so on. In pachinko, the balls fall where they want to, and all you can do is sit and watch them. (Rentaro may tell you the machine on the right pays better, but that's not my experience.)

You score 1 or 2 balls when the balls fall into some holes. When they fall into the white daisy at the bottom of the board, the pictures at the top spin, and if any two pictures are the same, you score 10 to 150 balls. The highest scorer is three stars.

To play pachinko in this game, you need to find a card for the machine. You can pick one up --

-- in one of the baskets at the baths in the ryokan.

Pick a machine (you can only use three of the machines on the left), insert the card, and click on the round yellow button to start flinging the balls. The longer you click on the button, the farther the ball flies.

Each time you insert the card, you'll have 50 balls. When that runs out, back away from the machine and take your winnings. You can play as many times as you want without having to refill the card, which is not the case in real life, of course. (I bet the person who lost this card is still crying.)

When you're tired of playing or you want to cash out, go to the souvenir machine in the middle of the room and use the balls you've collected to buy little gewgaws. To use them, open the drawer at the bottom, pull out the bag of balls in your inventory, and dump them in the drawer. To get the remaining balls back afterwards, push the red button to open the drawer and click on the balls.

Incidentally, it's perhaps worth mentioning that in the real world, pachinko isn't nearly this much fun. It costs a lot, the odds are fixed so the house almost always wins, the parlors are jam-packed and full of cigarette smoke, and children aren't allowed in. Me, I'll stick to the Nancy Drew version.