Peg Board Tips: Where to Release the Ball

Updated October 2026

Peg Board gives you ten balls, a staggered field of pegs and nine scoring slots at the bottom. It is tempting to look for a clever release point, and the slot values seem to invite one. In fact the board is built so that no spot has an edge, and the slot values are arranged in a way that punishes intuition. This guide breaks down the board, the scoring and what our own simulations of the game's physics say about where to let go.

The board and the scoring

The playing field has ten rows of pegs, spaced about 36 pixels apart whatever the width of your screen, so a narrow phone gets eight pegs per row and a wide one up to twelve. Each row is shifted half a gap against its neighbours, and every other row ends in a half-peg pressed against each wall. Together those rules mean that no straight vertical line from the top can reach the slots without meeting a peg. Underneath sit nine equal-width slots worth, from left to right, 10, 5, 2, 1, 0, 1, 2, 5 and 10 points.

The values are added, never multiplied, so a game is simply the sum of ten slot values. The theoretical range is 0 to 100. A round ends after the tenth ball settles, and your best total is stored on your device. Scores are points only: there is no betting, no currency and nothing to win except a place in the Hall of Fame.

Notice the shape of that row. The centre slot pays nothing, the two next to it pay one point and the edges pay ten. Most of the value is concentrated in the outer two slots, which together cover less than a quarter of the width. That matters, because the pegs naturally spread balls around the middle of the board.

How a drop works

You can tap anywhere on the board; only the horizontal position of your finger counts. The ball always appears near the top edge at that position, with no sideways speed at all, and starts to fall under constant gravity. While one ball is in play, further taps are ignored, so there is no way to stack several balls at once.

Every time the ball touches a peg it rebounds with a little over half of the speed it carried into the peg, and the game adds a small random sideways kick so that a ball cannot balance or bounce identically forever. The side walls bounce the ball back in the same way. Once the ball drops into the slot area at the bottom, thin dividers between the slots hold it in its lane, and the slot it ends up in when it touches the floor is the one that scores.

That random kick on each contact is the reason two drops from the same spot rarely end in the same slot. By the time a ball has struck several pegs, its starting position has very little influence left.

What our simulations show

To check how much the release point matters, we copied the game's physics into a standalone script and dropped thousands of balls from each of 26 positions between a wall and the centre (the board is symmetric), on boards as narrow as a small phone and as wide as the game ever gets. The numbers below are from that simulation, not from official figures.

• Every release point is close to even. Whether a ball started at the wall, a quarter of the way across or dead centre, it averaged between about 3.9 and 4.7 points, and no position stood out from the rest by more than random noise.
• Each slot catches about one ball in nine. The two ten-point slots together took roughly a quarter of all balls and the zero slot about one in ten, on every screen size we tried.
• Ten-ball totals cluster in the forties. A typical round lands between about 28 and 58 points, with the middle of the pack near 42. About one game in twelve reaches 60, about one in a hundred reaches 70, and a perfect 100 is roughly a one-in-a-million event.

Earlier versions of the game had a gap between the outermost pegs and the walls, and on wider screens a ball released right against a wall could slide all the way down into a ten-point slot. That lane has been closed, and scores from the new board go on a separate leaderboard.

Where to tap

Anywhere you like. Because the bounces erase the starting position long before the ball reaches the slots, there is no spot that pays more than another, and the edge is no better than the middle. The game does clamp the release point so the ball never starts inside a wall, so pressing at or slightly past the edge still gives a normal drop.

Avoid reading patterns into a few results. Two balls from the same spot rarely end in the same slot, and a run of tens from one side is luck, not a signal that the side is hot.

Odd behaviour worth knowing

The bottom row of pegs sits a little above the slot area, leaving room for a ball to pass between a peg and a slot divider, so balls no longer wedge there. As a safety net, a ball that stays within a few pixels of the same place for more than a second is popped gently upward and sideways so it can carry on. In our simulations of hundreds of thousands of drops at several frame rates, no ball ever stayed stuck.

The ball falls in real time: the physics advances in small fixed steps based on the clock, so it drops at the same speed and follows the same kind of path on a slow phone as on a fast one.

Rotating the phone or resizing the window rebuilds the peg field to fit the new shape. Do it between drops rather than while a ball is falling, so the ball does not suddenly find itself among pegs that moved.

A simple plan for a high total

1. Pick any release point that is comfortable for your thumb; it makes no measurable difference to your average.
2. Enjoy the bounces rather than trying to steer them. Nothing about earlier balls changes the odds for the next one.
3. Wait for each ball to settle and the drop counter to update before tapping again; taps during a fall are ignored, not queued.
4. After the tenth ball, save the score from the round-complete card if you want it on the leaderboard.

Because the game is a fixed ten balls with no rising difficulty and no release point that beats another, a high total is a matter of luck. Play it as a short, relaxed game of chance and save the rounds where the tens fall your way.