So-called skill games in Pennsylvania walk, talk and look like a slot machine. Only in Pennsylvania would a court need to clarify that the machines are, in fact, slot machines in the eyes of state law. Only in Pennsylvania does something that looks like a duck, acts like a duck and quacks like a duck be considered a fish for decades.

Now, that the state Supreme Court has finally settled that the duck is, in fact, a duck by ruling skill games are slot machines and must adhere to Pennsylvania’s crime and gambling statutes, the state Legislature must pick up the ball it dropped years ago and craft regulations for the roughly 70,000 currently unregulated machines throughout the state.

This issue has been festering for years before court cases were filed in 2019 and 2020 seeking clarification on the state’s skill game laws. One, a 2019 case in which a bar and skill games supplier filed a petition for return of property after police seized their machines, centered on the question of what the devices are: Do they involve enough luck to be considered gambling, or enough skill that an experienced player can consistently win? In the other case, Pace-O-Matic, a major skill games developer and distributor, sued the state to get a judgment about whether the games are legal.

Sure, there have been public proposals, but that has really just been public posturing that accomplished nothing. Nobody in the halls of Harrisburg wanted to touch skill game regulation until they absolutely had to because the decision is going to upset someone. State casinos want the artist formerly known as skill games to be taxed at a rate close to the rate slot machines are taxed. Others want a lower rate over fears that the slot machine tax rate will result in the skill games being pulled from locations around the state because they’ll be too expensive for most people to play and the locations that house them won’t be able to afford to keep them.

State lawmakers were more than happy to act as if skill games were anything but glorified slot machines for years because it was the path of least resistance. There is no path forward that doesn’t upset someone – and the General Assembly has no one to blame but itself for putting itself in this unenviable position.