How to play
A triangle of pegs, a ball, and a row of buckets along the bottom. That’s all there is. The ball falls from the top, clicks off one peg per row, and lands in a bucket marked with a multiplier.
- Pick Rows: 8, 12 or 16. More rows mean more buckets and a wider spread of payouts.
- Pick Risk: Low, Medium or High. This swaps the multipliers printed on the buckets; the board itself doesn’t change.
- Pick a chip: 10, 50, 100 or 500. That’s the bet on each ball.
- Press Drop. When the ball settles you get the bet times that bucket’s multiplier.
The strip above the board keeps your last twelve results, so you can see how a setting has been treating you. You start with 1,000 credits.
Why the middle pays less
At every peg the ball goes left or right with exactly even chances, and the bucket it ends in is just the number of times it went right. That gives the familiar bell shape. With 16 rows, the middle bucket catches about one ball in five, the next two about one in six each, while a single edge bucket is reached once in 65,536 drops. With 8 rows an edge is 1 in 256; with 12 rows, 1 in 4,096.
Multipliers follow the opposite pattern: small in the middle where the ball usually goes, large at the rare edges. Every table is symmetric, so left and right are the same.
The nine tables
Edge to centre, the multipliers are:
| Rows | Low | Medium | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8 | 5, 2, 1.1, 1, 0.5 | 12, 3, 1.3, 0.7, 0.4 | 28, 4, 1.5, 0.3, 0.2 |
| 12 | 8, 3, 1.5, 1.3, 1.1, 1, 0.5 | 25, 10, 4, 2, 1.1, 0.6, 0.3 | 160, 22, 8, 2, 0.7, 0.2, 0.2 |
| 16 | 15, 8, 2, 1.4, 1.3, 1.2, 1.1, 1, 0.5 | 100, 40, 10, 5, 3, 1.4, 1, 0.5, 0.3 | 1000, 130, 26, 9, 4, 1.9, 0.2, 0.2, 0.2 |
The bold figure is the centre bucket. On 16 rows High, the five middle buckets all pay ×0.2.
What that means in practice, as the chance that a ball gives back at least your bet:
| Rows | Low | Medium | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8 | 73% | 29% | 29% |
| 12 | 77% | 39% | 15% |
| 16 | 80% | 45% | 21% |
Low risk keeps most balls at or above break-even and loses a little on the middle bucket. High risk loses most balls (on 12 rows, about 85% of them) and pays it back in rare hits.
Returns
Each table’s exact return, from the chance of every bucket:
| Rows | Low | Medium | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8 | 97.9% | 98.1% | 98.3% |
| 12 | 97.5% | 98.0% | 97.1% |
| 16 | 98.4% | 97.6% | 97.6% |
The spread is about one percentage point. The best table, 16 rows Low, and the worst, 12 rows High, play completely differently but cost almost the same over time.
Strategy
There’s no aiming. The path is random at every peg, and the animation just shows the path that was chosen. What you’re really picking is the feel of a session.
- Long, calm sessions: 16 rows Low. Four balls in five come back at break-even or better, and the worst bucket loses half the bet.
- Something in between: 12 rows Medium. The ×4 and ×10 buckets come up often enough to notice.
- Chasing a big number: 16 rows High. Most drops return a fifth of the bet. Either ×1000 edge comes up about once in 32,768 drops, so it isn’t the plan. The ×26 and ×130 buckets are the hits you’ll actually see now and then.
- Size the chip to the risk. On High, a 500 chip with 1,000 credits can be gone in a handful of drops. A small chip lets the rare buckets have time to show up.
For a game where you choose when to stop instead of where the ball lands, try Mines. Pachinko Rush is a busier ball-and-pin machine.
If you enjoy Peg Drop, try Penalty Shot or Petits Chevaux next.
