In the first Pine of Plinko, the Plinko board is the headline act, though the reels still pull their weight. Symbols are reactive, paylines still connect, and the bonus starts there. Pine of Plinko 2 keeps a similar setup but adds a livelier round on top, with more ways to shape a drop before it starts and more going on once the balls are loose. Print Studios has doubled the top prize and wrapped the lot in drifting snow. The snow is the least of what changed.
Land 3 or more scatters and the reels give way to a Plinko board. If you have not met Plinko, it is played like an upright pinball table. You release a ball from the top, and it tumbles down the pegs, landing in one of fifteen slots along the bottom, each printed with a multiplier of your stake. The outer slots pay 1,000x, the middle ones as little as 0.1x, and every ball that settles tips its prize into a running total. Each scatter carries a number, and their sum is your count of drops, one for each press of the button. At the start a drop releases a single ball, so you can play them one at a time to follow each one, or hold the button and send a run of them down at once.
The meter above the board is what makes a round grow. Balls that hit the bumpers in the centre feed it, and once it is full, you move up a level. Each level adds 10 more drops and doubles the balls each drop sends down, from one to 2, 4, 8 and up to 256 on a single drop.
The quirk to be aware of is the timing. Fill the meter halfway through a drop, and nothing changes yet. The new level, the extra balls, the doubled count, all of it waits until your current set is done.
This is the one tool the studio has truly bolted on. When the scatters land, each shows a number, and before any ball drops, you can re-roll it for a bigger figure and a fuller stack. The price sits on the button, and you can keep going until the game cuts you off. The rules say rerolling is disabled when the number is too high; in our sessions, the button disappeared at 10 or above.
More balls in hand mean more chances to strike the bumpers and reach the next level, though each re-roll eats into what a round pays back, so it is a call to weigh rather than a free upgrade.
Two more touches can appear when a new level lands. Bumper buckets sit among the slots, and a ball that falls into one is flung back up for a fresh trip past the pins, a chance at the meter as much as at a prize.
Golden pockets are a rarer sight. Catch a ball in one, and a Golden Ball drop waits at the close of the level, a single ball sent onto a board stripped of its bumpers and stocked with richer slots than usual.
The base game offers two ways to trigger the bonus sooner. Scatter Boost puts the same again on your bet and crowds the reels with more scatter symbols, roughly twice as many as normal.
If you prefer to skip the wait entirely, the feature buy drops you onto the Plinko board for 92x your stake, with a random set of scatters and numbers.
Neither touches what happens once the balls fall. They only settle how you get there.
Every scatter lands with a ball count printed on it, but one alone does nothing; you need three or more together to open the bonus, and their numbers then add up to your starting drops. Landing them is the real job of the five reels. Ten fixed lines pay left to right, three symbols the minimum, with only the best win on each counting, and there is no wild to patch gaps or free-spins round in reserve. Piney, the white-bearded gnome up top, is the one to hope for, well clear of the pinecone-crowned Kingly and the rest of the cast.
Stakes run from 0.10 to 50 FUN a spin, shown in the game’s FUN demo currency. The return sits between 96.32% and 96.49% on an ordinary spin, edging up a touch with Scatter Boost on or the round bought outright, and the exact figure moves with how freely you re-roll. Volatility is high, and a game round can pay up to 20,000x your stake. A few operators run leaner builds, so the rules screen repays a glance before you play.
| Symbol | 5 | 4 | 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Piney | 200 | 10 | 2 |
| Kingly | 50 | 4 | 1.20 |
| Coney | 20 | 2 | 1 |
| Waley | 10 | 1 | 0.60 |
| Purple Flower | 3 | 0.60 | 0.30 |
| Yellow Flower | 2 | 0.50 | 0.20 |
| Green Flower | 2 | 0.50 | 0.20 |
Payouts for matching five, four and three symbols at a 1 FUN stake. The scatter shows a number instead of a prize, and no wild appears in the symbol set.
Pine of Plinko 2 had every excuse to be a quick winter reskin, and it turns out to be the opposite. Print Studios has gone back into the bonus and built in the things the 2022 game went without, so there is now something to weigh before a round and something to watch during one, where the earlier game simply handed the balls over. It looks and sounds lovely with it, all soft snow-light and slow flute, even to a wind that ruffles the gnomes' beards. What keeps it at a 4 is how thin things are outside that one bonus. The reels don't pay that much on their own, and with only one feature and a buy to lean on, it wants an idea or two more. As a Plinko round you actually play instead of only watch, it is a clear step up on what came before.
Load the game up, and the mood does the selling. A small house sits carved into a pinecone, lantern-orange light in its windows, snow gathering on the eaves as flakes drift past the reels and the snowbound pinewood glows beyond, all to a slow flute tune. Every so often, a gust of wind crosses the screen, dragging the snow sideways and leaving a thin skin of ice on the screen for a moment. The gnomes feel it too. Piney’s beard streams in the draught, and between spins he smooths it flat or taps his hands, while the small Plinko keeper up top blows a kiss on a win. It is a warm, unhurried thing to sit in front of, nearer a snow globe than a slot.
Scatter Boost never turned up a bonus for us, so we bought in at 92x. That went in on 14 drops, the total across the scatters, fun to follow, though too few bumper hits left the meter short. Next time we spent 366 FUN re-rolling the scatters up to 10, 60 and 6, opening the round on 76 drops. This is where the timing quirk showed. We charged two meters early, but neither level arrived while those opening drops lasted. Only once they ran out did the meters cash in, each one nudging the counter at the top up a level, adding 10 drops and doubling the balls each drop sends down. The count rose to sixteen a drop, and nine drops at that rate put 144 balls bouncing around the board at once. It closed at 290.50 FUN, short of what the buy and the re-rolls had run to, and that is the honest shape of a cold round.
The game called it Godlike, but we were still down.
None of that dented the fun. There is a small knack to the round. From our session, nudging one scatter up to 10 or so before you set off, instead of paying to push them all high, looked the steadier play. The more balls you take in, the likelier you are to charge a meter and win another level, and with the count doubling each time, a good run snowballs fast. It rewards a bit of patience without feeling like a chore.
The original Pine of Plinko came in two versions. A plain one returned around 96.5%, while a Dream Drop version wired to Relax Gaming’s progressive jackpots slipped to the low 90s. Pine of Plinko 2 is a standalone with no jackpot tie-in, its return sitting in the same mid-90s as the plain original. Where the earlier game handed you a set number of balls, this one lets you re-roll for more, folds in the bumper buckets and the Golden Ball, and pushes the maximum to twice what the original allowed, up from 10,000x.
Played next to the earlier game, Pine of Plinko 2 feels like the version the idea was always heading for. The re-roll hands the front of a round some agency, the buckets and golden pockets keep the drops from blurring into one another, and the snow-and-flute setting is easy to lose half an hour in. It is still a game with a quiet base and a lone bonus carrying the load, so it will not suit everyone. The free play demo is the easy way to run a few rounds and see how the balls fall for you.
