Plinker

About the game

Plinker is a chance-and-aim game with very simple rules. You pick a spot along the top and drop a ball into a pyramid of pegs. The ball bounces down and lands in one of the slots at the bottom, each with a score from 5 up to 100 in the middle.

You start with ten balls and earn one more every hundred points, so a good run can go on a long time. The top of the board is wide enough that your drop point matters, but the bounces are random enough that the result never repeats.

The physics are real, run by a physics engine, with synthesised sounds. Your best score is saved in the browser.

Playing it here

Click Play and the game opens on its title screen. Press Play there to start. The sound can be turned off with the speaker icon in the corner, and the game also has a fullscreen button.

Controls

Mouse or touch to aim and click to drop. Left / Right also aim, Space drops.

A few things worth knowing

Try the middle. It is a narrow target, but the only way to reach 100.

Count your balls. Every hundred points gives you one more, so a lucky streak extends the game.

FAQ

Is it only luck? Mostly, but the drop point changes the odds.

Credits and licence

Plinker is one of the games in LittleJS Arcade by Frank Force, and it runs on his LittleJS engine. Both are released under the MIT licence; the licence text is linked from this page. The collection's repository includes notes for AI coding assistants, so the code was written at least in part with AI help. The graphics are drawn by the code and the sounds are synthesised, so the game loads no image or audio files. The source code is on GitHub.