📌 Pin Circle

🕹️ How to play

1. How to start playing Pin Circle online: The page opens mid-game: the disc is already spinning and the launcher is already loaded. Tap anywhere on the stage — or press Space or Enter, or hit the Pin It button — to fire. There is no aiming, so where you tap does not matter.
2. When to fire in Pin Circle: Watch the landing ring at six o'clock. It marks where a pin fired right now would stick, and the readout under it is the room you have left to the most dangerous pin on the board. A solid green ring means go, a dashed amber ring means it is tight, a dashed magenta ring with a cross means you would clash.
3. How to clear a level in Pin Circle: Drop the number in the middle of the disc to zero — it counts the pins you still have to place. Clearing sets off the bloom, shows your time and your tightest margin, then rolls straight into the next level with more pins and a faster disc.
4. What to do when a Pin Circle level blocks you: Fail the same level enough times in a row (five on Standard) and a free Skip This Level button appears on the fail card — no ad, no payment, nothing taken away. You can also drop to the Relaxed tier in settings, or reopen any level you have already reached from the level picker.

📖 Rules & variants

Pin Circle rules in one paragraph: a disc spins continuously with a few fixed grey obstacle pins already stuck in it. Every tap fires one pin from below; once it sticks to the rim it turns with the disc. If the new pin head lands too close to any pin already on the board, the level ends immediately. Place every pin the level asks for and you clear it.

How close counts as a clash: the verdict is an angle between two pin-head centres. Two normal heads clash below 12 degrees; a normal head needs 16.83 degrees against a violet wide head, and two wide heads need 21.69. That margin is drawn on screen as the readout under the landing ring — green for room to spare, amber for tight, magenta for impossible.

What the reload ring means: the thin cyan ring around the centre hub is the reload readout. While it is full, a shot cannot clash with the pin you just placed. It is an angle condition, not a cooldown — the landing point has to be at least 12.6 degrees from your last pin — so when the disc reverses back toward that pin the ring drains again. That is real information, not a stutter.

How the difficulty ramps: level 1 is the tutorial — three pins, a slow disc, and a clash only bounces the pin back instead of ending the run. Grey obstacle pins appear at level 3, reversals at level 5, speed changes at level 9, and thicker wide-head pins at level 14. From level 25 every dial is maxed and only the layout changes. Speed and direction changes light a telegraph arc on the upper rim half a second in advance.

What the three tiers change: Relaxed, Standard and Challenge move the speed ceiling (110 / 165 / 220 degrees per second), the size of a speed change, the pin count, and the free-skip threshold (3 / 5 / 7 losses in a row). Every tier runs the same solvability check, so the tiers differ in how hard a level is, never in whether it can be beaten. Each tier keeps its own separate progress.

Pin Circle tips that actually help: first, aim for the widest gap rather than the nearest one — the closest pin is not always the most dangerous, and a wide head further away can already be blocking you, which is exactly what the readout is measuring. Second, when pins are bunched up, wait for the disc to carry them apart instead of forcing a shot. Third, when the telegraph arc lights up, sit out one rotation: the landing ring jumps the instant a reversal takes effect, and that jump is the honest new answer.

A worked example: on Standard level 5 the two obstacle pins sit at 0 and 205 degrees, and a clean run places pins at 99, 61.5, 31.5, 150 and 270 degrees. The seven gaps then read 31.5, 30, 37.5, 51, 55, 65 and 90 degrees — exactly 360 in total — and the tightest shot of that run finished with 18 degrees to spare, which is the number the clear card reports.

❓ FAQ