PopGrabHow to Play
PopGrab is a music game in two halves. In Playhead you make a tune; in Pop Pinball every peg you hit plays it back.
Pop Pinball
Drag anywhere to aim, then let go to fire. The ball falls through a field of candy pegs, and every peg it touches lights up and plays the next note of your tune. When the ball leaves the field, the lit pegs pop.
Each board has 15 gold ★ pegs. Clear them all within 10 balls to win the board. As the ball closes on the last one, everything slows down, and your whole tune plays as the board clears. Once the last gold lights, the floor turns into three bonus bins for the rest of that shot, worth 1,000, 5,000 and 1,000 points.
The moving bucket at the bottom is worth catching: land the ball in it and you get that ball back. A single shot worth 2,500 points or more gives a ball back too. Run out of balls with gold still standing and you can watch an ad for three more, once a round.
Candy pegs score 10, gold 100 and power pegs 50, multiplied as the gold falls: ×2 after 6 gold, ×3 after 9, ×5 after 12 and ×10 after 14. Balls left over when you clear the board are worth 1,000 each.
Playhead
You hold three notes, each locked to a pitch row, and drop them onto beats while a playhead sweeps an eight-beat loop. When the playhead reaches a beat, three notes there that make a chord clear for big points, and two a fifth apart score a little. Crowd four notes that don't agree onto one beat and one of them turns sour, and a note you hold too long drops itself in and goes stale.
Sour notes fill the Key Drift meter. Let it fill, or crowd the board until it jams, and the run ends. Survive 28 laps — the tempo picks up a little every lap — and the loop is saved. Win or lose, the loop you built becomes your tune, the one Pop Pinball plays. If the loop drifts out of key or jams, you can watch an ad once a run to clear the sour notes and keep going.
The modes
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Pop Pinball
The standard round. Scores, Sparks and XP all count, and your best goes to the leaderboard.
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Playhead
Make the tune. Every finished run becomes the tune Pop Pinball plays, and earns Sparks too.
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Daily Challenge
One Pop Pinball board a day, the same for everyone, played to a shared melody rather than your own tune. Clear it to keep your streak going.
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Practice
Unlimited balls in Pop Pinball, or a Playhead loop that never speeds up. Nothing is saved.
Sparks, XP and levels
Every finished round earns Sparks, and as much XP as Sparks. In Pop Pinball that is your score divided by twelve, never fewer than four, plus 20% for a Silver rating or 50% for Gold. A Playhead run pays its score divided by thirty, never fewer than four, plus half again if the loop survives all 28 laps.
Each level needs about a quarter more XP than the one before, starting at 60.
Big moments — a level up, a new best score, a new tier, a streak day, a new achievement, or a Playhead loop that survives — open a celebration with a gift to unwrap. Swipe it up or tap it; inside are the Sparks that round earned.
Daily streaks
Clear the Daily Challenge with a Silver rating or better and it pays 25 bonus Sparks, once a day. Clear it on consecutive days to build a streak: each day of the streak adds 10 more, up to 100. Miss a day and the streak starts over.
Tiers and powers
Levels group into ten tiers. Each new tier re-tints the board and unlocks a power, and every second one adds a peg colour, from four up to seven. From Sherbet on, every board has two power pegs; hit one and your tier's power fires.
| Tier | Levels | Power |
|---|---|---|
| Bubblegum | 1–4 | — |
| Sherbet | 5–9 | Bomb Ball — the next peg it hits bursts and lights the pegs around it |
| Lemon Drop | 10–14 | Long Guide — the aim guide shows three bounces for two shots |
| Mint Pop | 15–19 | Extra Ball — another ball |
| Berry Blast | 20–29 | Double Score — the rest of the shot scores double |
| Cotton Candy | 30–39 | Multiball — a second ball splits off |
| Rock Candy | 40–59 | Chain Lightning — lights the three nearest gold pegs |
| Caramel Core | 60–79 | Magnet Ball — the ball curves toward gold |
| Starlight Taffy | 80–99 | Fireball — burns through pegs without bouncing |
| Legendary Confection | 100+ | Wild Power — one of the others at random, every time |
The music
This is the part that makes PopGrab itself. Your tune is a sequence of notes, and every peg a shot lights plays the next one, so a long shot plays a long run of your melody. A shot that plays a whole phrase adds harmony to the notes after it, and a second phrase adds an octave shimmer.
At the end of a round you get a Symphony rating from how many whole phrases of your tune you played and how much of the board's gold you cleared: Silver for one phrase and 45% of the gold, Gold for two phrases and 70%.
The leaderboard on Home ranks players by their best Pop Pinball score. The Rank tab in the tune editor ranks them by longest melody: the most notes a single shot has played.
Sound palettes change the synth behind your pops. Classic is always yours; Arcade, Lo-fi and Orchestral each unlock for three days when you watch a rewarded ad.
The tune editor
Free for everyone. Drag a note to change its pitch or tap two to swap them, choose 8 or 24 notes, a scale and an instrument, and set tempo, room and harmony. Save makes it the tune your rounds play.
History
Every Pop Pinball round played with your tune, and every finished Playhead run, saves the tune it played to History, which keeps your latest 300 on this device. From History you can play a tune, open it in the editor, share it as a card or an audio clip, back it up, or delete it.
Merge takes two or three 8-note tunes from History and combines them into a new one: end to end, woven note by note, or blended into one shorter line.
The AI Tuner
Describe a mood — "sad music-box waltz", "bright arcade march" — or pick one, and the AI Tuner reshapes your current tune to match, keeping its length and scale. Hear it beside the original, then keep it or discard it; either way it counts against your weekly allowance. You get 10 remixes a week and the first 3 are free; after those, each one asks you to watch a rewarded ad. It needs a connection.
Cloud backup
Progress is saved on your device first and always, so rounds work with no signal. A copy is mirrored to the cloud so a reinstall can get it back — but only if you have signed in with Google or Apple. A guest account cannot be recovered. Signing in brings what you played as a guest along with you, into a new account or into the one you already have.
Tune backups are separate. You can keep 10 tunes in the cloud for free, and while you have room, each round's tune is backed up on its own. Past that, backing up a tune from History asks you to watch a rewarded ad, up to 100 a month and 5,000 in all. Deleting a backed-up tune from History removes the cloud copy and frees its place. A tune that is not backed up still lives in your History on this device.
Achievements
- First Steps — finish your first round.
- New Flavor — reach Sherbet, the second tier.
- Leveling Up — reach level 10.
- Pop Machine — pop 500 pegs in all.
- Gold Standard — earn a Gold rating.
- Tune Smith — have 5 tunes in History.
All of them are counted from things the game already tracks, so you will pass most without going looking.
A few habits that help
- Go for gold early. The multiplier climbs as gold falls, so every peg after it is worth more.
- Use the aim guide. It shows where the ball first touches, so plan that bounce and let the rest happen.
- Once your tier has a power, a power peg is worth going out of your way for.
- Watch the bucket as the ball falls. A catch is a free ball.