Games like Plinko: ball-drop games with a twist

Plinko is one of the simplest casino games there is: drop a ball, watch it bounce, see where it lands. Fox Festival, from Nocturn Play, keeps that and adds things to aim for on the way down.

Updated 13 October 2026

If you want Plinko itself, Nocturn Play's Pearl Cascade is the straight version: 8 to 16 rows of crystal pegs, Low, Medium or High risk, and a Tentacle Burst button that drops six pearls at once. If you want Plinko with more going on, try Fox Festival, the pachinko-style ball game from Nocturn Play: you drop a ball through 14 rows of lanterns into 9 pockets, and torii gates on the way multiply the win. It adds a Fox Procession bonus where many balls fall at once and a four-level jackpot in the centre pocket.

Why people like Plinko

Plinko comes from the famous pricing-game show on television, where a disc zigzags down a board of pegs into a row of prize slots. Casino versions, from studios such as Spribe and BGaming and from the in-house games of many crypto casinos, kept the board and replaced the prizes with multipliers. Usually you choose a risk level and sometimes the number of rows, then drop as many balls as you like.

The appeal is honest and visual. There are no paylines to learn, no symbols to remember. Every ball tells a little story as it bounces left and right, and a run of balls landing near the edges is fun to watch even when you are betting small. The downside of most Plinko games is that the board is bare. After a while, every drop looks the same.

Pearl Cascade: Plinko with Madame Olga

In Pearl Cascade, a coral-pink octopus in a little top hat drops each pearl herself through a pyramid of crystal pegs, and open clams catch it at the bottom. You choose the number of rows, from 8 to 16, and a risk level. Low keeps the cups close in value, Medium stretches the curve, High pushes nearly everything to the edges, where the 16-row table pays several hundred times the bet. The tags under the clams update the moment you change a setting, and you can keep pressing Bet while pearls are still falling. An Auto tab runs a series of drops with stop limits on profit or loss.

Fox Festival: a Plinko board with a festival on it

Fox Festival is set at a Japanese lantern festival at night. The board is vertical, with 14 rows of lanterns acting as pegs, 5 drop points on the rail at the top and 9 pockets at the bottom. As in classic Plinko, pockets further from the centre pay more. You pick a drop point and let go.

One honest note: the drop point changes the ball's path, not your odds. The result is set on the server when you place the bet, and the bounce shows it. That is how most online ball-drop games work, and it is better to know it from the start.

Things to hit on the way down

This is where Fox Festival departs from a bare board.

• Torii gates marked ×2, ×3, ×5 and ×10 hang on the board. A ball that passes through one has its win multiplied; through two, both multipliers apply.
• Pinwheel windmills push the ball toward a better pocket.
• Three spirit foxes, the Ember Fox, the Moon Fox and the Ink Fox, sit among the lanterns. Touch one and the bonus begins after the ball lands.

The Fox Procession

The bonus round turns one ball into a shower. Balls rain down the board, every peg they hit raises a shared multiplier, and each lantern lit along the way brings one more ball. Everything is paid when the last ball lands. A button lets you buy the Procession directly, for 72× the bet, if you would rather not wait for a fox.

A jackpot in the middle

In most Plinko games the centre is the dull place to land. In Fox Festival the centre pocket opens a jackpot with four levels: Bell, Moon, Sun and the Grand Fox at the top. So the middle of the board is no longer just the low-paying spot. The maximum win is 5,000× the bet, with 7 bet levels to choose from.

Plinko or Fox Festival?

A classic Plinko board like Pearl Cascade is perfect when you want something minimal: pick a risk level, drop a hundred pearls on autobet, look at the total. Fox Festival is for players who like the drop but want more going on, with gates to pass, foxes to wake and a bonus round that fills the board with balls. It also looks far richer, which makes it a good fit for longer sessions on a phone held upright.

If you like quick rounds without reels in general, two other Nocturn Play games fit the same mood: Altitude Zero, a crash game, and Night Bingo.

Try it free

Pearl Cascade and Fox Festival can be played free on nocturnplay.com, in any browser, with no download, on a phone held upright or sideways.

For casino operators

Ball-drop games sit well in a mini-games or arcade section next to crash titles, and they appeal to players who never open a slot. Platforms that connect to Nocturn Play directly receive Pearl Cascade and Fox Festival with the rest of the range, in 52 fiat currencies and 11 cryptocurrencies. See the partners page for details.