The Plinko board game: from The Price Is Right to the toy on the shelf

The board you can buy in Australia

The Plinko on Australian shelves is a party game: a board of pegs, a handful of pucks and prize slots along the bottom. Big W lists a Jenjo Games Plinko as an online-only item ¹. Jenjo, the Australian maker, describes it as “a classic game of chance and skill” for parties, fundraisers and team-building, measuring 60 cm long, 30 cm wide and 53 cm deep, with an upright that sets to 52, 57 or 60 cm. The set has a foldable board, six pucks, a carry bag and rules, and is recommended for ages 3 and up ². Jenjo’s Australian page doesn’t say how many rows of pegs or slots the board has.

Amazon AU lists two licensed boards from Buffalo Games: The Price Is Right Plinko Game, which stands “over 26 inches tall” and comes with 50 cards, five chips, a board and a stand, for ages 8 and up ³; and Plinko Hi-Lo, an 18-inch board with seven chips, prize cards and money cards, for ages 10 and up ⁴. Both showed “Currently unavailable” with no price when we looked on 29 September 2026. Kmart and Target didn’t return a Plinko product from our connection, so we can’t say either way.

The Price Is Right: where the name comes from

Plinko is a pricing game on the American show The Price Is Right. The show’s own page explains it: the contestant “must identify correct digits in the prices of small prizes to earn Plinko chips”, then “takes their chips to the top of a game board and releases them, one at a time, into slots at the bottom of the board containing money amounts”. Each chip “is worth up to $10,000” ⁵. The game debuted in January 1983 ⁶; the exact date usually given, 3 January, comes from Wikipedia ⁷.

With five chips the theoretical ceiling is $50,000, “if all five chips miraculously went straight down and landed in the middle $10,000 slot” ⁶. The record, set in May 2017, is $31,500 ⁶. According to Wikipedia the nine slots run $100, $500, $1,000, $0 from each edge inwards, with $10,000 in the centre, and the centre was worth $5,000 until 1998 ⁷.

Notice the shape: the biggest prize sits in the middle, where chips land most often, and the zeros sit next to it. The casino game turns that upside down, putting the biggest multipliers at the rare edges and the smallest in the centre. That’s the single largest difference between the toy and the gambling version, and the main guide explains why the casino board is priced that way.

The Australian Price Is Right

Australia has had its own The Price Is Right since 1973, across 0-10, Seven, Ten and Nine, with hosts including Ian Turpie and Larry Emdur; since 2017 Network Ten has held the rights ⁸. Plinko appears to have featured only in the 2012 Seven series with Emdur, with slots of $50, $100, $250, $0 and $1,000 and a maximum of $3,000, in a season whose prizes were sponsored by Big W ⁸. All of the Australian detail here comes from Wikipedia; we couldn’t find a primary source, and the article itself gives two different end dates for the 2012 run.

The Galton board: the physics underneath

Long before television, the board was a statistics demonstration. Francis Galton described it in Natural Inheritance (1889): “the pins are disposed in a quincunx fashion, so that every descending shot strikes against a pin in each successive row”, and the shot that piles up in the compartments below “approximates to the Curve of Frequency” ⁹. The Linda Hall Library puts it more plainly: the device “consists of spaced pegs, upon which balls fall, and bounce right or left at random. The resulting pattern at the bottom is inevitably the familiar bell-shaped curve” ¹⁰.

That bell curve is the whole story of Plinko odds. On a board with eight rows there are 256 possible paths; 70 of them end in the middle slot and only one at each edge. The simulator shows the curve forming ball by ball, and the RTP page has the exact figures for every pocket.

Toy, show, casino game: what’s the same and what isn’t

Spribe, one of the casino providers, says its Plinko “originated from popular American game show” ¹¹; BGaming’s rules say the same. Same pegs, same bounces, different price tags. How to play covers the casino controls step by step.

Plinko and pachinko

People often ask about pachinko in the same breath. Pachinko is the Japanese pinball-style machine with hundreds of small steel balls, flippers and prize exchange, played in dedicated parlours. Plinko is a single disc or ball dropped through a triangle of pegs into a slot. They share a peg board and nothing else: pachinko has a launcher and moving parts, Plinko is pure gravity and chance.