Pegbound: Pachinko Roguelike

Drop a ball into a field of pegs and watch it earn its way down.

Every peg you hit adds pips. A few add boost instead, and boost is the scarce half, because your score for a shot is pips multiplied by boost. The basket the ball finally drops into multiplies the whole thing. Hit a quota and the round is yours.

Then the run starts asking harder questions.

CHARMS, ON FIVE HOOKS, IN ORDER

Between rounds you spend what you won. Charms are where a run gets its shape: one adds four boost, one doubles it, one copies the charm on its left, one adds boost for every peg caught in a blast. They fire from left to right, so a charm that adds is worth more standing before a charm that multiplies than after it. Moving one along the row is a real decision, not tidying.

Some charms work together when they hang side by side, and some families pay out when three of them share the row. Nothing tells you which in advance. You find them, and the Collection keeps them.

A BAG OF BALLS, NOT A BUTTON

The game draws your next ball from the bag, and a few redraws a round let you send one back. A Heavy ball is wide and slow. A Split ball becomes two on its first peg. A Glass ball doubles your boost, and one shot in four it shatters and scores nothing. A Bullseye ball pays a fortune for landing in the middle basket, which is the basket that pays worst. Fifty balls, and the bag is yours to build.

PEGS THAT DO THINGS

Gold pegs pay you. Bomb pegs take their neighbours with them, and a bomb caught in another bomb's blast goes off in turn. Mirror pegs score the last peg again. Latecomer pegs pay more for every peg the ball has already hit. Charge pegs need hitting twice. Crit pegs multiply. Level any of them up in the shop and they pay more for the rest of the run.

EIGHT STAGES, AND A FINAL ROUND THAT BREAKS A RULE

The final round of every stage brings one of sixteen hazards. Boost pegs are dead. Half the board goes dark. Your charms sit out the first shot. One shot, that is all. You can see which one is waiting before you commit, and you can skip an earlier round for a named reward instead of its pay.

EIGHT MACHINES

Win a run on a machine you have not beaten and the next one opens. Each changes the rules of a whole run: an extra charm hook, a bag of nothing but heavy balls, two shots a round, quotas ten times higher on a machine where pips and boost are averaged and then squared. Every machine you beat adds its own charm to the shop, and a won run can carry on past stage eight for as long as it holds.

BUILT FOR ONE THUMB

Portrait. Slide the launcher along the top rail, drag on the board to aim, and let go to fire. A run is five to ten minutes. It plays fully offline and nothing needs an account. Sign in to Google Play Games if you want your progress saved to the cloud and twenty-two achievements to chase.

HONEST ABOUT MONEY

The whole game is free. There is one ad, at the bottom of the board, and one optional purchase that removes it for good. No lives, no energy, no timers, no locked chapters, and nothing you can pay to score higher with.

There is also a daily board: the same field of pegs for everybody, everywhere, all day, and a streak for every day in a row you finish it.

If something feels wrong, say so, and it will get looked at.