Pull the Pin

It is all about the order

Pull the Pin is a physics puzzle dressed up as a simple tap game. Balls sit stacked inside a tall vessel, held up by horizontal pins. Pull a pin and everything resting on it drops. Your goal is to land the bright balls in the cup at the bottom, but mixed in among them are dark balls marked with an X, and if even one of those falls into the cup, the level is lost. So you're never just yanking pins; you're choosing a sequence.

The whole game lives in that sequence. Pull the pin under a safe chamber and the good balls pour down; leave the pin under a hazard alone and its dark balls stay stranded on a ledge, harmless. Get greedy or careless with the order and you send an X ball straight into the cup.

Reading a level

• Before you touch anything, trace where each pin's load will fall. Bright balls should have a clear route to the cup; hazards should not.
• Deal with the safe balls first when their drop is clean, and save any pin that would release a hazard for last, or never pull it at all.
• Watch for shared paths: sometimes a bright ball and a dark ball sit above the same channel, and the order you pull decides which one reaches the cup.
• If a pin has no upside, leave it. You don't need to pull every pin, only enough bright balls into the cup with every hazard kept out.

There are twelve hand-built levels, and each is a small logic knot rather than a test of reflexes. The early ones teach the idea with just a pin or two, while later ones stack several chambers and extra hazards, so a single pull can trigger a chain of drops you have to picture before you commit. Take your time. Nothing moves until you do, and the thirty seconds you spend tracing drops before the first pull is the cheapest insurance the game sells.

Work backward from the cup

When a level won't crack, reverse your thinking. Start at the cup and climb. Which pin is the last gate a ball passes on its way in? That pin is your final pull, and everything above it has to be sorted before it goes. Solving in reverse turns a wall of pins into a checklist: last gate, then the chamber above it, then the chamber above that.

Here's the classic pattern it exposes. The top chamber holds two bright balls and one hazard. Under the hazard's side sits a short slanted pin; under everything runs the long straight pin that opens the way down. Pull the slanted pin first and the hazard rolls off its little shelf into the dead pocket at the side, out of the story. Now the long pin is safe, and the bright balls drop clean. Pull the same two pins in the other order and the whole group travels together, hazard included, straight into a lost level. Same pins, opposite results, and the only difference is sequence.

Physics adds one wrinkle worth respecting: balls roll. A ball that lands on a slope keeps moving, and a crowd of balls shoves its outliers sideways. So don't only ask where a ball will fall. Ask where it will settle, because a hazard that drops harmlessly onto a ledge can still creep off it when a later pull shakes the pile.

Born from a fake advert

The pin puzzle has one of the strangest origin stories in games. Around 2019 it was everywhere, but only as an advert: mobile ads showed pins, chambers, treasure and lava for games that contained nothing of the kind. Millions of people downloaded a home-decorating game expecting to pull pins and found ordinary match levels instead. Complaints piled up until 2020, when the UK's advertising watchdog banned some of those ads for being misleading. Studios drew the obvious lesson: people clearly wanted the game inside the fake ad, so real versions got built, and the borrowed idea turned out to be a genuinely good puzzle about gravity and order. The version here plays it straight. What you see is what you pull, and the only trick is the one you work out yourself.