It's basically impossible to have the ball turly under control for any length of time, but when possible, try not to release the wild balls until there are at least 4 built up. The more balls there are in your first multiball on a ball, the easier it is to have subsequent multiballs with high ball counts as well, and the best scores on this game just come from having as many balls in play as possible for as long as possible.
The red pop bumpers score 1 point, or 10 points when lit. They are lit by the yellow passive bumper in the very top of the game, or the rollover button just left of the Release Wild Balls saucer. If the kickers are lit, the bumpers will not be, and vice versa. Points can be built up rather quickly if a ball gets stuck for a moment between one of the lower pop bumpers and the nearby vertical wall.
Kickers also score 1 point, or 10 points when lit. They are lit by the blue passive bumper just below the Lites Red Bumpers passive bumper, or by rolling over the button just to the right of the Release Wild Balls hole. When the kickers are lit, points will most easily come from balls zipping back and forth between the two lower kickers and hitting the rollover buttons there along the way. The kickers in this game are very vertical, so slingtown can last quite a while, but if the slingshots are lit, there's nothing really wrong with that.
The game starts with 0 balls in the Wild Balls display on the backglass. The four rollover buttons in the center of the playfield, as well as switches behind the two diagonal walls at the top of the playfield, each advance the wild balls counter. Every 3 advances, one Wild Ball is added to the pot, up to a maximum of 6. The Wild Balls count is maintained between balls and between players if a 2-player game is happening. Shooting the Release Wild Balls saucer in the center of the playfield releases the lit number of wild balls from a kicker lane in the left of the playfield.
During multiball, there's not much strategy other than to try to flip balls away whenever one is near the flippers. You just want to stay in multiball as long as possible, but that's easier said than done. The Wild Ball count can still be advanced during multiball, so the idea here is to chain multiball starts together by getting more balls in play after some drain, taking advantage of all the rollover buttons that were hit during the chaos of multiball. Despite the max Wild Balls count being 6, there are actually something like 9 pinballs in the game, so there can be even more than 7 balls in play at once if the Wild Balls are built up then released a second time before too many of them from the first multiball drain.
The side lanes in the middle playfield score 20 points and drop the ball directly onto the upper tips of the bottom slingshots. Nudge where possible to try to get these to move toward the center of the table instead of immediately into the out lanes.
Balls-a-Poppin' has no in lanes. However, the flippers do not back up directly to the slingshots: there is a gap in between that makes trapping the ball(s) impossible. The side out lanes score 20 points, and the out lanes between the lower slingshots and the flippers score 10 points.
The flippers are very far apart, but two rubbers that form a funnel shape between the flippers can help the ball bounce out from a center drain.
There is no end of ball or end of game bonus. The Wild Balls count can be built up between balls and between players, but any balls in the Wild Balls count at the end of the game are simply lost.
The game can be set to 3 balls instead of 5.
Even in a two-player game, a tilt ends the entire game for that player. If player 1 tilts on ball 2 of 5, player 2 gets to play their final four turns consecutively unless they also tilt.
Back to top