Plinko+

Quick verdict: one ball, 27 different boards

Plinko+ is Pragmatic Play's first arcade title, launched on 28 July 2025. It is the most stripped-back game the studio makes. You don't get reels, symbols or a bonus round. A ball drops from the top of a pyramid of pins, bounces left and right, and lands in a bucket that pays a multiple of the stake. The published RTP is 97.5% and the top multiplier is 1,000x.

What makes it worth a closer look is the settings panel rather than the animation. You can pick nine line counts (8 to 16) and three risk levels. That gives 27 separate boards, each with its own set of multipliers. Only one of them, 16 lines on High risk, carries the 1,000x bucket. On the default board (8 lines, Low risk) the best bucket pays 5.3x. So most of this review looks at how those two controls change the numbers you are really playing for.

Plinko+: key rules

How one drop plays out, pin by pin

Pragmatic Play's own description is short. Balls drop from the top of the pyramid into buckets at the bottom and award prizes. As they fall, they randomly hit and bounce off pins. That is the whole game loop, and there is no decision to make once a ball is released.

Before each drop you set three things:

1. The stake. The range is commonly listed as 0.10 to 250.
2. The number of lines. This sets the height of the pyramid, from the smallest eight-line board to 16 lines.
3. The risk level. Low, Medium or High, selected from a control at the top of the screen.

Then you release the ball. It hits the first pin, goes left or right, hits a pin on the next row, and so on until it drops out of the bottom row into a bucket. Whatever multiplier is printed on that bucket is applied to the stake. A 5.3x bucket on a stake of 1 returns 5.3. A 0.5x bucket returns 0.5, which is half the stake.

That last point matters more than anything else in the game. Many buckets in Plinko+ pay less than 1x. On the smallest and largest boards, every bucket returns something, but not every bucket returns the stake. On the 16-line High-risk board the centre buckets pay 0.2x, so the most likely result of a drop is getting a fifth of the stake back.

There is also no collect or stop decision during a drop. You can't end the round early. The result is fixed when the ball lands.

The line count: why a taller pyramid pushes the edges further away

A board with a given number of lines has one more bucket than it has lines. That follows from the geometry: a ball that passes eight rows of pins can finish in any of nine positions, so the eight-line board has nine buckets and the 16-line board has seventeen. Pragmatic Play puts it more simply: bigger pyramids have more prize buckets.

The layout of those buckets is always the same. The official page says the buckets in the middle award the lowest prizes and the outer buckets award the biggest. The multipliers are symmetrical, so the far-left and far-right buckets carry the same top value.

Pragmatic Play doesn't publish the odds of each bucket, and it would be wrong to present exact probabilities as the game's own figures. But the geometry explains why the edges are rare. If every bounce were an even left-or-right split, a ball on an eight-line board would need to go the same way eight times in a row to reach one edge. That is 1 path out of 256. On a 16-line board it needs 16 identical bounces, which is 1 path out of 65,536 for each edge. Meanwhile, a huge number of mixed left-right paths all end near the middle.

That is the real trade-off behind the line count. More lines let Pragmatic Play put a much larger number on the edge buckets, because far fewer balls reach them. Fewer lines keep the edges close enough to land more often, but with smaller numbers on them.

Low, Medium and High: what the risk slider does to each bucket

The risk slider doesn't change how the ball moves. It changes what is printed on the buckets. Pragmatic Play describes the High setting as having smaller prizes in the middle buckets and larger wins in the outer buckets. Low goes the other way: the centre loses less and the edges pay less.

The lowest and highest bucket for each risk level on the smallest and largest boards are widely listed as follows:

The two most widely documented points are 5.3x as the top bucket on 8 lines Low, and 1,000x only on 16 lines High. We don't quote bucket-by-bucket figures for the boards between 9 and 15 lines; the multipliers for whichever board you pick are printed along its bottom row before you drop.

A few things stand out from the table.

• The floor barely moves on Low. The worst bucket is 0.5x on both 8 and 16 lines. Low risk loses at most half the stake per ball on either board.
• High risk cuts the floor to 0.2x on both sizes. The centre becomes much harsher, and that is what funds the bigger edges.
• The ceiling grows sharply with lines on Medium and High. Medium goes from 12.8x to 110x. High goes from 28.2x to 1,000x. On Low the ceiling only goes from 5.3x to 16x.
• The jump from Medium to High on 16 lines is roughly ninefold at the edge (110x to 1,000x), while the centre drops only from 0.3x to 0.2x.

In plain terms, Low gives a better chance of getting most or all of the stake back on each ball, with the occasional small gain. High produces long runs of small returns broken up by a rare large result. That is exactly what the numbers above describe.

RTP of 97.5% and the low-volatility label

Pragmatic Play lists the RTP as 97.50%. That is a long-run average worked out over a very large number of drops. It means that, in theory, the game returns 97.5 units for every 100 staked across millions of balls. It doesn't describe any single session, and a short run can land far above or below that figure.

For context, 97.5% is higher than the 96% range where many slots sit, and it matches the RTP Pragmatic Play gives for its later arcade game Spire+. Pragmatic Play doesn't list a lower-RTP version of Plinko+. The 97.50% figure is the only one on the official page.

Volatility needs more care. Pragmatic Play's COO Irina Cornides described Plinko+ at launch as combining "simple, low-volatility gaming" with multipliers of up to 1,000x, which is why the table lists it as Low. The volatility is also often described as adjustable, because the risk slider changes the spread of results so much. Both views hold up:

• On the default 8-line Low board, every bucket sits between 0.5x and 5.3x. Results can't swing very far from one drop to the next. That is low volatility in the most literal sense.
• On the 16-line High board, buckets run from 0.2x to 1,000x. A long series of 0.2x results with a rare edge hit is a very different experience, even though the game's overall label stays Low.

In practice, the label describes the game as it starts, and the controls let you move a long way from it.

Reaching 1,000x: the only board that carries it

The 1,000x maximum is available only on 16 lines with High risk. The official page ties the 1,000x value to the High setting, and on that setting it sits on the outer buckets of the tallest board.

To hit it, a ball has to finish in one of the two outermost buckets of the tallest pyramid. Using the even-bounce model from earlier, each of those edges is 1 path in 65,536. Pragmatic Play doesn't publish the real bucket odds, so treat that as an illustration of why the result is rare, not a quoted figure.

There is no feature that raises the maximum above 1,000x. The game has no multiplier bonus, no retrigger and no way to add value to a ball after it is released. The largest single result is always the printed edge bucket on that one board.

Autoplay, quick drops and the other controls

Plinko+ keeps the interface simple, but it is widely described as including a few useful controls:

• Autoplay. You can set the number of drops and add stop conditions.
• Faster drops. Holding the drop button gives turbo drops, and a speed setting offers Turbo and Quick options (sometimes labelled Quick Spin).
• Several balls at once. Balls can be released in rapid succession or several together. Pragmatic Play's own wording also refers to balls in the plural.
• A results history. A history table shows the time, stake, multiplier and result for each drop.

None of these controls touches the maths. Autoplay and turbo only change how quickly drops are resolved, and several balls in the air are simply several independent drops, each landing on the same printed buckets.

Settings are changed between rounds. Pragmatic Play's launch release says players can adjust the pyramid size and risk level between rounds, so you can't change the board while balls are still falling.

How Plinko+ differs from a classic plinko board

The best-known online plinko game from a major studio is BGaming's Plinko, released on 28 January 2019. Comparing the two shows how little Pragmatic Play changed in the core rules, and where it did change things.

The structure is almost the same. Both use a pyramid of 8 to 16 rows, three risk settings, bigger values at the edges and a 1,000x top result. The clearest measurable difference is the RTP. BGaming lists 99% for its Plinko, while Pragmatic Play lists 97.5% for Plinko+.

So what does the "+" add? Pragmatic Play doesn't explain the name, and we won't guess at it. The documented differences are about presentation and product line rather than rules:

• It opens a branded arcade range. Plinko+ was the first title in Pragmatic Play's arcade portfolio. Every game in that range carries the same plus sign.
• Multi-ball play. Several balls can be dropped in quick succession or at once, which speeds up the pace compared with watching a single ball per round.
• Wide language support. The official page lists 33 languages.

If you already know classic plinko, nothing here will need explaining. The skill is in reading the board settings, not learning new rules.

Plinko+ next to Spire+ and Chicken+

Pragmatic Play's launch release named Spire+ and Mines+ as the next arcade titles, and Chicken+ followed on 26 March 2026. These games share Plinko+'s branding, but they play quite differently.

• Spire+ is a climbing game. According to the official page, you pick boxes to go up nine levels and try to avoid a flaming skull that ends the round. You can collect at any point. It has five difficulty settings from Easy to Master, and 2, 3 or 4 boxes per level. Its published RTP is 97.50%, and Pragmatic Play says some setting combinations can return up to 98.25%.
• Chicken+ has you guide a chicken across an 8-bit highway. Each lane you cross raises the multiplier, one accident ends the round, and you can collect along the way. It has four difficulty tiers. Pragmatic Play gives 24x as the Easy-mode top result and more than 3,000,000x for the top tier.

The key difference is control. In Spire+ and Chicken+ you decide when to collect, so every round has a stop-or-continue choice. Plinko+ has none. All of its decisions happen before the drop. That makes it the most passive of the three, and on its default board the least swingy. Its 1,000x ceiling is also far below what Pragmatic Play lists for Chicken+.

Who Plinko+ suits

• Players who want to set their own risk. Few games let you move from a 0.5x to 5.3x spread up to a 0.2x to 1,000x spread with two controls.
• Anyone who dislikes feature-heavy slots. There are no symbols, bonus rounds or rules pages to learn.
• Short sessions. One drop resolves in seconds, and autoplay with multi-ball speeds things up further.
• Not ideal for players who want to make choices during a round. If that appeals, Spire+ or Chicken+ from the same range fits better.
• Not ideal for anyone chasing very large multiples. The 1,000x cap is modest next to many modern slots and sits on just one board.

Where Plinko+ works and where it doesn't

Pros

• The published 97.5% RTP is high for a Pragmatic Play release.
• Line count and risk level give real control over how results are spread.
• Rules are fully visible: every bucket's multiplier is printed on the board.
• Autoplay, faster drops and multi-ball play keep sessions quick.

Cons

• Many buckets pay less than 1x, so a "winning" drop often returns less than the stake.
• The 1,000x maximum is available on only one of the 27 board settings.
• BGaming's older Plinko offers the same structure with a listed RTP of 99%.

Plinko+ FAQ