Plinker
By Frank Force · MIT license. Source · All credits
About Plinker
Drop a ball into a field of pegs and watch it clatter down into one of nine slots. The middle slot is worth a hundred and the edges are worth five, so every drop is a small bet on physics you cannot quite control. You start with ten balls and earn another every hundred points, which turns it from a toy into something with a run to it: score well early and you keep going, drift to the edges and it ends. There is no money in this and nothing to buy.
How to play
Aim across the top and drop a ball. It bounces down through ten rows of pegs into a scoring slot. You start with ten balls and earn one more every hundred points.
Controls
- Move the pointer or drag to aim across the top
- Click, tap or press Space to drop
- Left and Right arrows also aim
What makes it worth playing
- Nine slots scoring 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 50, 20, 10, 5 from the edge inward
- Ten rows of pegs, so the fall is genuinely chaotic rather than a fixed path
- You earn a ball every hundred points, so a good run extends itself
- A saved best score and nothing to purchase
Screenshots
Captured from this build on 2026-08-27.
Tips from playing it
- Aiming dead centre is not the best drop. The first peg row splits it either way, so a slight offset often runs straighter than a centre hit.
- Watch where your balls actually land over a few drops rather than where you aimed. The bias is real and you can correct for it.
- Once you are one ball from the end, take the safe middle rather than chasing the hundred.
Why this game is here, and what we changed
Chosen because Casual had one game in it and this one is over in two minutes, which is a shape the arcade was missing. Its own title screen calls it Plinker and we have kept that name. We host it on our own servers, so it loads straight into the page with no third-party ad code and no pre-roll video, and its MIT licence is kept alongside it. We played it through at phone size on 2026-08-27 before publishing this page, and the screenshots above come from that session rather than from the original project.
More on how we pick and fix these: what we changed in the open-source games and how we test a game.
- Category
- Casual
- Plays in
- Your browser, no download
- Orientation
- Portrait
- Players
- One player.
- Difficulty
- Pure luck with a nudge of aim
- Typical session
- 2 to 6 minutes a run
- Last tested by us
- 2026-08-27
- Created by
- Frank Force (MIT)
