🔻 Plinko Drop
Real physics. Watch it bounce. Hold your breath.
How to play Plinko Drop
- Every name gets a bin at the bottom. Weighted names get more than one.
- The ball is dropped from the middle with a random nudge and genuinely bounces its way down.
- Crank the bounciness up for chaos, down for something closer to dignity.
- More peg rows means a longer, more uncertain fall.
Your list is shared across every game on Pickyroo — set it up once here and the wheel, the races and the bracket will all be ready to go with the same names.
When to use Plinko Drop
Plinko is the one people argue about, because the middle bins really are more likely and everybody can see that they are. The honest fix is not to fake the physics but to reshuffle the bin labels before every single drop, so the lucky middle belongs to nobody in particular.
- Explaining probability to a class — it is a working Galton board with your names on it.
- Picks in front of a sceptical audience that wants to watch the mechanism, not trust it.
- Groups of roughly four to fourteen, which is where the bin labels stay readable.
- Occasions where an eight-second fall is the point rather than the cost.
Questions
Doesn't the ball land in the middle more often?
It does — that is a Galton board, and the middle bins really are more likely. Which is why the bin labels are reshuffled before every single drop, so nobody owns the lucky middle. Across any one drop, every name has exactly the same chance.
How do weights work here?
By handing a name more bins, not by bending the physics. Weight 3 means three bins out of the total.
How many names fit?
Up to fourteen bins across the board — past that the labels stop being readable.
Try another one
Same names, completely different result — your list follows you from game to game.