Updated 4/22/26
Here are some of my favorite pinball resources.
The Pinball Map
The Pinball Map is my go to way to find out where to play pinball in an area. I have linked the website, but they also have iOS and Android apps. Just select your area and you will see where all the pinball is. It has locations, machines, distances, and even operators. You will find everything from individual machines in dive bars to destination pinball venues like Free Gold Watch and the Pacific Pinball Museum.
Match Play
After the Pinball Map to find a place to play, Match Play is the pinball tool I use the most. Over the years it has become the go-to way to organize tournaments. For event organizers, it handles almost all of the minutiae that goes into running a tournament. For players, it tells you who and what game you are playing and tracks everything you do during the tournament.
Amazingly it has integrated Pintips/OPDB/Bob’s Guide/Pinball Primer (see below), so players have an enormous library of game information at their fingertips. Just click on the game title and you have all kinds or options to see rule sheets, guides, and videos!
Tilt Forum Rulesheets
This tends to my go-to place for modern game rulesheets. When I google a modern machine for a rulesheet it invariable leads me here. They are my go-to way to track down the detailed deep knowledge that is hard to nail down just by playing a game. How to get an add-a-ball, what are the ways to get extra balls, what are the exact requirements for that final wizard mode, or some bizarre specific detail about how a reward works. Things like that!
Pindigo
Pindigo is a cool iOS and Android app to share your pinball scores with other people. You take pictures of your high scores and load them into the app, and it keeps a list of all your high scores by game. You can follow people, and people can follow you. You can see how your scores rank among your friends and also how they rank globally. My Pindigo name is DavidLee.
Pintips
Pintips are crowd sourced quick and dirty tips on things to do on a specific game. People can then vote for the ones they feel are useful, and the good ones float to the top of the list. It used to be its own website, but has now been folded into the Match Play interface.
Pacific Pinball Museum
If you are in the Bay Area, the Pacific Pinball Museum is an amazing place. You pay an entrance fee, and then can play all day. They have 80+ machines from all eras (wood rails to current moderns), so you get to build the skills needed to play EMs, solid states, and modern games. Since you aren’t paying coin drop, you can practice difficult and risky skills with impunity. I learned how to tap and alley pass on their Harlem Globetrotters, Evel Knieval, and Seawitch.
Replay Foundation Rulesheets
Back in the beginning of the internet, there was no world wide web. No youtube. No Match Play. The only place to go for pinball help was rec.games.pinball! A Usenet bulletin board system where people would post their rulesheets out of the goodness of their hearts to help the greater pinball community at large. And the Replay Foundation seems to house them now (they used to live on the PAPA website). They were just big old text files with amazing detail! I particularly am fond of the ones by Bowen Kerins that detail the exact value of every jackpot in games like Medieval Madness and Star Trek: the Next Generation.
Bob’s Guide and Pinball Primer
These are two great resources for game guides for older titles. Bob’s Guide covers over 400 different games from the 1960’s through the mid-1980’s. Pinball Primer has 800+ guides that are focused on the 70’s and 80’s but wiggle down to the 60’s and all the way up to 2017.
Dead Flip Tutorials
The Dead Flip Tutorials page has amazing animations of flipper skills, with names and even alternate names. If you don’t understand what someone said and it has to do with flipping, you can probably find it here. It may also give you some ideas (I played pinball 25 years before finding out about post passes and dead bounces)!
Open Pinball Database (OPDB)
I am not a programmer, so I don’t ever use the OPDB directly, but it has been wonderfully integrated into Match Play to provide text and video information about any game.
PAPApinball youtube channel
The PAPApinball youtube channel has tons of tutorials, recorded PAPAtv live streams, recorded competitions, and basic flipper skills videos. Here you can learn rule sets and see how the pinball gods play in competition. Here is the Basic Flipper Skills video.
Internet Pinball Database
(Update: The Internet Pinball Database is no longer being updated and hasn’t been encyclopedic since 2024. Resources for older games is still incredible but it is no longer the one stop place for pinball information.)
The Internet Pinball Database (IPDB) is the encyclopedia for pinball. It has all the nitty gritty details about every machine, when they were made, how many were made, what versions there are, who designed them, who programmed them, who did the art, playfield and back glass pictures, etc. If you want to know about a machine (everything but the ruleset), you can find it here.