Got a chance to play the new Avengers pinball table the other night. This was a Pro model (cheaper and stripped down from the LE/Premium models, but more features than the distinct “The Pin” home models) at The Know in Portland.

First impression: reminds me of X-Men - the main dynamic is shots that, hit enough times, start a mode keyed to a particular Avenger, and you want to collect them all. Haven’t triggered all of them yet, but they seem like your basic “make this shot to start, keep making it to complete” modes.

A major difference, though, is that these shots are a *lot* narrower and harder to hit, and require 4 shots to start. I assume that’s hard-coded, as each shot has 4 lamps. (Also, compared to when X-Men showed up on location, the code seems much more polished, I wouldn’t expect nearly as much change on updates.)

There’s a few things that compensate for this difficulty. For one, if you soft-plunge and flip to an Avenger shot you’ll (I’m told) start the mode immediately, kind of like Sopranos. For two, modes don’t time out and remain active across balls. For three, there’s a pretty open lower playfield where missed shots can bounce fairly safely and probably advance something useful (Thor stand-ups, Hulk drop targets, S.H.I.E.L.D. standup mystery awards, or the Tesseract Cube)

For Hulk you need to drop 4 targets and then hit a saucer - it’s pretty shallow but there are some shots that serve it up perfectly. That starts a straight-up 4-ball multiball with a decently long save - I didn’t have time to take my eyes off the flippers to see if you could advance anything else while it was running - my guess is maybe the Loki and multiplier rollovers but nothing else. (Looking it up online, you can apparently make shots to complete Avengers during this mode, but I’m still not sure about starting them.)

The Tesseract Cube is basically the TotAN lamp. Spinning gives you points, spin it enough and you start a mode where… spinning gives you points. Meh, but the geometry of the table’s such that you can put some wicked spin on it pretty easy.

There’s a Loki multiball, LotR sword-style inlane/outlane rollovers light lamps, all 4 lights a lock at the orbits, 3 balls locked starts it. Haven’t discovered anything special here yet.

Finally, you get your multiplier from a standard “3 rollover lanes above a bumper triangle” setup in the back right of the playfield. But each lane has 2 lights (one per Avenger) - a skill shot plunge to the lit lane will give you both, but otherwise each rollover seems to only give you one (as long as they’re not both lit already). As usual they rotate with the flipper buttons, and all 6 will advance the multiplier. Bumpers and the multiplier lanes seem to get a lot of action on the multiball, so that works out.

I’ve just barely made it to a replay at 16,000,000 so far, but on reflection my scoring strategy (which I’m going to go out tonight to try) is to play a game of Avengers like a ball of Monster Bash - get shots 4 times to start features, and then hit the big green guy just left of centerfield for a multiball to complete them.

I like it a lot - when Stern was first left as the only manufacturer standing, they made some really iffy tables (maybe due to their attempts to cut costs and make pinball newbie-friendly). But between AC/DC, X-Men, and now Avengers, they really seem to be on a roll lately.


Things I don’t like:

The ball can get stuck under the arms of the Hulk toy without triggering him pretty easily. The arms are the first things to trip in a ball search, but for a mechanism that doesn’t really do much in gameplay that’s an annoying flaw, especially if you’re on the cube timer.

Ramp returns over the inlanes mean it’s pretty much impossible to see whether the Loki letters are lit there without craning forward - might be the “trickster” theme, but meh.

Also it’s tough to see if the 3 Avenger lights nearest the top-right corner on the multiplier rollover lanes are lit.