Vector Pinball

Vector Pinball is a pinball game for Android that Brian Nenninger of Dozing Cat Software has been building since 2010. It is open source under the GPL, it has no ads and nothing to buy, and the 2026 release, version 1.16.0, ships nine tables.

The look is the point and also the trick. Everything is drawn with lines and circles, like an old vector arcade screen, which keeps the game tiny (about 3 MB) and fast on almost any phone. Underneath, the ball runs on the Box2D physics engine, so it rolls, spins and ricochets with real momentum, and the tables are designed around that rather than around animations.

Each table has its own rules. The first ones are classic layouts: light rollovers to raise the multiplier, clear drop-target banks to restore the outlane ball savers, shoot a ramp to start multiball. Later tables get stranger. One puts a star map in the centre and asks you to trace constellations to lock balls. Another has five planets orbiting a sun, with gravity that drags passing balls into orbit. Table 8, designed by Jack Morgan, is a pool table where you sink numbered balls before going for the 8-ball, and the newest is a poker table where ramps deal you cards toward a hand.

Controls are just touches: tap the left or right half of the screen to flip, with an option to have any touch raise both flippers. There are toggles for zooming in on the ball, haptic feedback and OpenGL rendering, plus high scores per table.

What keeps it interesting is how much each table rewards learning its rules. Every layout restores the outlane ball savers when you clear a bank of drop targets, so a good player can keep a ball alive for a long time, but multiball always asks for something specific: lighting a ring of points in matching colours, filling in a constellation, or building a three-of-a-kind. The game explains each table's rules in its About screen, which is worth reading before your first ball. The project is also unusually open about how it is made. The tables are plain JSON files in the public repository, there is an experimental table editor, and Table 8 came from a contributor rather than the original developer, which is how a sixteen-year-old pinball game keeps gaining tables.

The honest catches. It is Android only; there is no PC or iPhone version. It is a single-player game. The graphics are deliberately minimal, which some players will find charmless. The store descriptions still say seven tables; the current version has nine.

For PlayBound it is exactly the kind of game we want to surface: small, free in every sense, maintained for sixteen years, and better than it looks.