Pond of Plinko slot runs its bonus through three screens before a prize is paid, and each one sets up the next. Three or more scatters open it. A price appears under every scatter to re-roll its number, and whatever you settle on becomes your stash of pearls. Those pearls play a game of their own, where filling a tube collects an Enhancer. Every Enhancer is then pinned to one of the nine stages of the Plinko board. You can see where each one waits, though the stage it needs may never unlock.
Water can flood the reels after any spin. When it does, a waterfall drops across the reels with 6 stone prize meters set into the falling water, and balls tumble past them into the holes beneath. Each ball that lands feeds the meter it belongs to.
The meters are not equal in what they ask for. Each carries a fixed grid of holes, and the count runs backwards to the prize: 18 on the 10x and the 20x, 12 on the 50x, 10 on the 100x, and 5 apiece on the 1,000x and the 10,000x.
Fill one and it pays its value against your bet, anywhere from 10x to a 10,000x meter sitting low among the rocks. Order matters more than size here. A meter on 5 holes is a small target, and the 10,000x sits lowest on the falls where least reaches it, while the 18-hole meters catch enough to top out first far more often. So this is a scramble across 6 targets rather than a build toward the largest.
Land 3 or more of the pearl scatters and the Plinko Bonus opens. Each one carries a number, and those numbers added together set how many pearls you take into the round,
Before anything falls, you get the Scatter Re-Roll, which prices each pearl on its own and offers to send its number back for a fresh one. Some rolls are offered at 0.00, and the game is blunt about the difference. Pay for a re-roll and it goes on the round’s total bet, which moves the RTP up its range. Take a free one and the RTP falls instead, trending to zero with repeated use.
Your pearls are then spent in the Enhancer Game, a second board dressed as an underwater chamber. Bubble-flowers grow up the middle of it as bumpers, and 9 glass tubes stand in a row underneath. Each pearl you release knocks about among the flowers and charges the tube it strikes. Each tube shows the Enhancer it holds, riding higher as the tube fills.
Fill a tube and its Enhancer is yours, and the tube comes back holding a different one. Whatever you have collected when the pearls run out goes into the Plinko Game with you.
Each Enhancer you collect is assigned to one stage, and up to 3 can share a rung. They arrive on a rail overhead and stay in view for the whole round, waiting on the stage they were given.
The board is a peg field with 15 prize buckets across the bottom, reading 1000x, 100x, 10x, 5x, 1x and 0.5x on the way in, then 3 buckets at 0.1x in the middle before the values climb back out again.
Every stage hands you 10 drops, and 3 bumpers clustered in the centre of the pegs charge a progress bar overhead. Fill that bar and the next stage unlocks, though it waits its turn until the drops in your hand are gone.
Each new stage puts twice as many balls on each press, so the ladder climbs 1 ball, then 2, 4, 8 and on to 256, with 9 rungs in all. Once no unlocked stage is left, the bonus is over.
The Feature Bet panel sells 3 alternatives to waiting for scatters to land during regular play.
None of the 3 changes the round you land in. They only settle how you got to it, and the win cap of 30,000x your bet applies regardless of how you came in.
Seven symbols and a scatter are the whole cast, with nothing substituting for anything, so the 20 win lines have to be filled the hard way, every one of them starting on reel one.
The scatter is the pearl, and it pays nothing on its own: three of them open the Plinko Bonus, and the numbers they carry are what you take into it. Among the rest, the gnome is the symbol to watch, though a row of 3 at a 1.00 FUN spin paid exactly 1.00; the top symbol’s smallest win hands back the stake and no more. A second line took that spin to 1.20.
Stakes run from 0.10 to 30.00 FUN in free play, and the Feature Bet panel prices its options against the stake you have set. Payback sits between 96.10% and 96.49% on an ordinary spin, and the volatility is high, which the Plinko Bonus makes obvious the moment the ball count jumps under you.
| Symbol | 5 | 4 | 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gnome | 200.00 | 5.00 | 1.00 |
| Red Shell Mask | 25.00 | 3.00 | 0.50 |
| Blue Shell Mask | 10.00 | 2.00 | 0.40 |
| Green Shell Mask | 5.00 | 1.00 | 0.20 |
| Purple Pebbles | 3.00 | 0.60 | 0.10 |
| Yellow Pebbles | 2.50 | 0.50 | 0.10 |
| Green Pebbles | 2.50 | 0.50 | 0.10 |
Paytable values read at the 1.00 FUN we spun. Yellow and green pebbles are identical from top to bottom, and purple parts company with them above the 3-count.
Print Studios has given the ordinary spins something to do. Water ran twice down the flume over our reels with nothing behind it. The third time it came, the reels flooded, prize meters surfaced in the falling water, and the 20x filled for a 1.00 FUN spin returning 20.00. We bought the Plinko Bonus for 100.00, and the buy price was not the whole of it. The re-rolls that follow are optional, and four of ours took the round to 188.30 before it came back 212.50. A base-game feature reaching 10,000x, and an Enhancer Game ahead of the Plinko board, earn this 4.3 here against Pine of Plinko 2's 4.0.
The Enhancer Game asks you to play for what you carry in, and the Enhancers it deals do genuinely different jobs. Print Studios has made this a handsome thing to sit in front of as well, moving you out of the pond and into an underwater chamber, then a sunlit grotto for the board itself.
The price is reset after every roll, and it can go up even when the pearl you just replaced came back smaller, which is how a round quietly gets expensive. Each Enhancer is also tied to one stage, and a stage only unlocks once the bumpers have charged the progress bar, so the ones parked on the far rungs may never come into play at all. Once play starts the Enhancers give up their names and travel as coloured balls, so anyone who has not memorised 6 icons is back in the rules mid-round to find out what is coming.
Pond of Plinko arrived a year after Pine of Plinko 2, and snow survives only on the peaks at the far edges of the screen. Everything nearer has thawed into a green, wet corner of one world, where coral-pink flowers climb the stonework beside a spoked timber window and a leaf the size of the roof hangs over the lot. Look at the reels and the change goes deeper than weather. Where the last game dressed its grid in bright crystal blooms, this one carves everything out of pond stone, so the low symbols are pebbles laid in spirals and the middle ranks are faces wearing shells for hats. One gnome survives the recast, still tapping his fingers between spins and landing with a small bounce. What he has learned since is to duck under his hat when the water comes.
Water is the other thing the setting does constantly. It comes off the rock beside the spin button and along the flume over the reels, and every room the bonus takes you into has more of it pouring out of the walls. The Enhancer Game looks out of arched windows with fish and coral drifting past. The Plinko board is a sunlit grotto with a waterfall either side falling into pools. So when a spin ends and the grid disappears behind a wall of water, the pond is only carrying on as it has all along. It runs the win screen too, the water line climbing the display as the total rolls up through Epic and into Ultra.
The Scatter Re-Roll is the part of the round you actually decide, and the game prices each decision separately. Ours opened on scatters of 4, 5 and 6, 15 between them, at 30.40, 24.50 and 19.50 FUN a re-roll.
We paid the 30.40, and that pearl came back an 11. The second went from 5 up to 14. This left the last pearl, and it went backwards from 6 to 5, and another reroll at 21.90 took the 5 to 4. The cost to try again was priced at 26.00. That is where we stopped, on 29 pearls total.
Where an Enhancer sits matters more than what it does. Those 29 pearls resulted in 3 of them, and the board puts each somewhere different. Extra Drops sat near the front and fired at the 4-ball stage, turning 10 presses into 13. Progressive Prize Buckets landed on the 8-ball stage and did the most work, marking two 0.5x buckets that grew each time a ball found them, so a pair of 0.5s finished the stage reading 6 and 4. The running total went 54.30 to 123.50 in that stage alone. Barriers had been pinned to the 128-ball stage. Our round stopped at 16, so an Enhancer we had spent pearls on sat out the round on its rail, in view and unused.
Put the two games together and the sharpest difference is what a way in now costs. Pine of Plinko 2 sold one boost at 100% of the bet and doubled your chance of reaching the bonus. Pond of Plinko sells Enhanced Scatter Boost at that 100% and moves the frequency up by 239.36%, then adds a cheaper rung its predecessor has no answer to, 20% more for 50.05%. The buy has moved the other way, 92x to 100x.
Underneath the pricing, the pegboard is the old one; drops still come 10 to a stage, the ladder still doubles to 256, and the Scatter Re-Roll, Bumper Buckets and Golden Ball are returning features rather than arrivals. What is new is the Enhancer Game, and the pearls that feed it. When we reviewed Pine of Plinko 2, the figures on the scatters set your ball count. Here, they buy you a hand of Enhancers first, and how much of the board you see can be assisted by them.
