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Balls
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A tiny pinball table. Tap the left half for the left flipper, right half for the right. Three balls — rack up bumpers and slingshots before the drain.
Each new ball enters at the top right, already moving left across the bumpers; its launch point, speed and angle vary a little every time. Touch the left half of the screen to flick the left flipper up; touch the right half for the right flipper. You can use both at once, and a flipper stays up for as long as you hold. Bumpers (the round disks) are worth 100 points and kick the ball away hard. Slingshots (the orange angled walls above the flippers) score 25 and bounce the ball back into play. A ball is drained when it drops off the bottom, almost always through the gap on the outside of a flipper, between the lower end of the slingshot and the flipper's pivot. The two flipper tips nearly meet, so the ball cannot fall between them while both flippers are down or both are up; the middle only opens while one flipper is raised and the other is not. You have three balls total.
Don't flip at every ball you see. The novice instinct is to mash the flipper the moment the ball nears it, which usually pops the ball up weakly so it falls straight back down and has to be saved again. The good move is to wait: let the ball roll most of the way down the flipper toward the tip, then flip. The tip delivers way more force, and the angle off the tip points the ball toward the bumper field where the points live.
The bumper cluster is a money trap. Once a ball gets caught between two bumpers it bounces back and forth scoring a hundred points per bounce, and you can't influence it — just let it cook. Try to send the ball into the bumpers high and slow rather than fast and shallow. A fast shot tends to escape the cluster on the first bounce.
Slingshots are your safety net, not your weapon. The angled walls above the flippers will deflect any ball that hits them back upward — that buys you time even when you mistime a flip. But slingshots also accelerate the ball downward when it comes off them at a bad angle, so don't deliberately fire at them.
The middle is safe only while the flippers match. The two tips almost touch, so a ball dropping straight down the centre lands on them whenever both flippers are down or both are up, and you can still flip it away. Raise just one flipper while the ball is over the middle and you open a gap it can fall through — for a ball coming straight down, either leave both flippers down and let it settle, or flip both together. The real danger is the gap on the outside of each flipper, between the lower end of the orange slingshot and the flipper's pivot, which no flipper covers. A ball that trickles slowly off the bottom of a slingshot or rolls back along a raised flipper toward its pivot tends to drop through there, so flip a cradled ball before it rolls back to the pivot.