Plinko board

Why the bounce is honest

Every tool on this site decides its outcome before it animates, and this board is where that rule is hardest to keep. The slot is drawn first, weighted exactly as a peg board weights itself. The page then searches for a drop that actually lands in that slot and plays that drop.

So the disc you watch is a real simulation, with real collisions, and the slot it visibly falls into is the slot that was drawn. If the search cannot find a drop for the slot it wanted, the board keeps the slot the disc really reached rather than announcing something the bounce did not do.

The shape a peg board makes

Each peg sends the disc left or right with the same chance, so the slot it ends in depends on how many lefts and rights it collected. There is exactly one way to go left ten times out of ten and land at the edge, and two hundred and fifty-two ways to split five and five and land in the middle. That is the whole distribution, and it is why the middle fills up.

The Tally tab shows the theoretical chance beside the count you have actually collected. Drop twenty and the two disagree. Drop two hundred and they stop disagreeing, which is the same lesson the marbles teach with fractions instead of bounces.

Labels, and what to use it for

The slots take your own words, which turns the board into a decider: put chores in the slots, or forfeits, or which team goes first. The edges are rare, so put the thing nobody expects there and the good outcome in the middle where it will actually come up.

For a draw where every outcome should be equally likely, this is the wrong tool and the wheel or the bag of tokens is the right one. A peg board is for when you want the odds to be uneven and visible.

Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for

The tool runs entirely in your browser. There is no account, nothing you make is uploaded, and nothing you type is sent anywhere or put into a link.

The page itself is not silent, though: it carries advertising code and a visit counter that sets no cookie, and the cookie page says exactly what each of those does.

There are no stakes here. Nothing is wagered, nothing of value is won, and the draw is a party mechanic, not a lottery.

This page remembers your settings in your browser under pph.plinko.rows, pph.plinko.column, pph.plinko.labels and pph.plinko.muted, and nowhere else. Clearing your site data for papercarnival.com removes it.