Peg Pop Tips: Aiming, Ricochets and Saving Balls

Updated October 2026

Peg Pop hands you ten balls and a field of blue and orange pegs, and asks you to clear every orange one. It feels like luck the first few times, because the ball bounces in ways that are hard to follow. It is not random, though. The launcher, the gravity and the bounce are all fixed values, and once you know them you can predict where a shot will go well enough to plan the order you take the pegs in. This guide explains the physics that matter, how points and balls are counted, and the habits that turn a ten-ball game into a multi-board run.

How a shot really flies

The game runs in a fixed virtual field 360 units wide and 560 tall, scaled to fit your screen, so every phone plays the same physics. The launcher sits at the top centre. Touch anywhere and the aim line points from the launcher toward your finger; drag to adjust and lift your finger to fire. Because aim follows the position of your finger rather than the distance you drag, a quick tap fires straight away toward wherever you tapped.

The aim is limited to about 77 degrees either side of straight down, and the ball always leaves heading downward. More importantly, it leaves gently. The launch speed is small compared with gravity, so the ball curves downward almost at once. By our own calculation from those values, an unobstructed shot crosses the height of the top row of pegs only somewhere in the middle third of the field, roughly between 120 and 240 units across. Aiming hard to the side does not send the ball to the far corner; it just drops it a little further out.

Pegs return about 70 percent of the ball's speed when it bounces off them, while the side walls return about 86 percent. There is no floor. A ball that slips past the last peg and misses the bucket is simply gone.

What counts, and when

A peg flashes white when the ball touches it, but it is only removed when the shot ends. That means a ball can bounce off the same peg several times during one shot, and it still pays only once. Blue pegs are worth 10 points and orange pegs 120. Clearing the last orange peg on a board adds 1,000 points and refills some balls, then a fresh board appears. The refill shrinks as you go: four balls on each of the first four boards, three on the next four, then two, then one, and none from the seventeenth board on.

If a ball stops making downward progress for about a second, the game removes the peg nearest to it so it cannot stay stuck, and that peg is removed without scoring anything, orange or blue. You will occasionally see a ball resting in a cradle of pegs before one disappears beneath it; that is this rule at work.

Boards are laid out on an eight-row grid with nine pegs per row, offset on alternate rows, with each spot left empty one time in five. On the first board about 15 percent of the pegs are orange, with a minimum of five, and the share keeps rising by one point for every board cleared, with no cap. Orange pegs are only ever placed on spots a shot can reach, which we explain below. The counter at the top right always shows how many orange pegs remain.

Shot selection: clusters below, ricochets above

Because the ball falls steeply, the lower and central rows are the easiest to hit directly and the outer pegs near the top are the hardest. Our test, firing at single pegs on an otherwise empty field over two thousand angles, found that 24 of the 72 peg positions cannot be struck by a direct shot at all. They sit along the outer columns, mostly in the upper rows. Those spots can still hold blue pegs, which only a ball ricocheting off another peg can pop. The game never puts an orange peg on one of them: before a board appears, every orange is checked against real shots on an empty field, so each orange can be hit with no help from other pegs once the way to it is clear.

• Open the awkward oranges early. An orange high on the outside can always be reached on an empty field, but while blue pegs stand in front of it the angle that gets there may not exist yet. Clear a lane toward it while you still have plenty of balls instead of leaving it for last.
• Aim into dense groups. A ball entering a tight cluster rattles around and collects several pegs, each counted once. Ten pops in one shot is worth more than ten careful single hits that each cost a ball.
• Use the side walls. A shot angled steeply outward can strike the wall low on the board and bounce back inward through pegs that a central shot would miss.

The bucket is your ball bank

On the first board the bucket at the bottom is 52 units wide and slides back and forth at 70 units per second, turning around at each end of the field. Every board you clear makes it 3 units narrower and 10 units per second faster, and from the nineteenth board on it is gone. A ball that drops into it after popping at least one peg is refunded, so the shot cost you nothing; a ball that touched nothing is not. Within a board it moves the same way every time, which means you can learn its rhythm: watch where it is when you release and how long your ball usually takes to reach the bottom.

Catches matter more than they look, mostly on the early boards. In our simulation, firing at random angles caught about one shot in nine and usually ended on the first board. A simulated player that tried eight angles per shot and kept the best cleared about nine boards on a typical run and thirteen at most, and one that tried forty-eight angles reached about eighteen. Every one of those runs ended: once the bucket and the refills are gone, each shot costs exactly one ball. Ball economy on the early boards, where the bucket is still wide, is what sets up a long run.

Planning a whole board

1. On a fresh board, start with a shot into the busiest central area. It scores well and opens lanes for later shots.
2. Next, look at every orange that sits behind other pegs. Plan a shot that clears the pegs in front of it, or one that bounces off them into it, before you spend balls elsewhere.
3. Use the middle of the board for oranges in the lower rows, which you can usually hit directly whenever you like.
4. When only one or two oranges are left, think about the bucket on every shot. A miss that is caught costs nothing and gives you another try.

Common mistakes

The first mistake is aiming at the target peg instead of at the point where the ball will be when it gets there. Gravity bends every shot, so aim above and outside where you want to land. The second is emptying the centre of the board too quickly. Those pegs are the bumpers that turn one shot into five pops, and once they are gone every shot collects far less. The third is forgetting that pegs only disappear after the shot ends; a ball rattling between two pegs is collecting them once each, not repeatedly. Your best score stays on your device, and any score above zero can be saved to the Hall of Fame from the game-over card.