Silverball guide · Fish Tales
The jackpot remembers you
Fish Tales looks like a friendly machine about catching a big one. Its scoring escalates across the whole game, and one missed hurry-up can stall it completely.
The ladder that carries across the game
Multiball jackpots here are a sequence, not a repeating prize. Shoot a ball into the Caster's Club to light the jackpot, then the eject hole within fifteen seconds to collect it. They pay 20M, then 30M, then 40M, and the tackle box shows you where you are.
The crucial part is that your position is remembered for the entire game. You do not need to collect all three in one multiball — whatever rung you reached is where the next multiball resumes.
Take all three and the captive ball lights for the super jackpot, worth 100M every single time you hit it until the multiball ends. Not once. Every hit.
And then it escalates. After you have been through a full sequence, every jackpot is worth at least double, including the super — and it keeps climbing with each completed sequence, up to six times. A 600M super jackpot is a real thing on this machine, and it is why finishing the ladder matters far more than any individual shot.
Learn the Caster's Club
The Caster's Club is the shot that gates everything above, and it is the hardest one here. It is worth more practice than anything else on the playfield.
During multiball there is a bonus on top: with three balls out, the Caster's Club flashes for Doubles Jackpot. Put another ball in and the jackpot doubles and the fifteen-second timer resets. Be careful though — if that timer runs out, both balls are fired back at you and you start the sequence again.
Some machines let you backhand it from the right flipper, though it is rare enough that you should test rather than assume.
Never leave a Monster Fish
Six fish sit in a school under the boat, and each lit ramp shot lights one. Get all six and the spinner lights for the Monster Fish hurry-up.
If it is lit, go and get it. Always. This is the strongest single piece of advice about this machine, and the reason is that a missed Monster Fish does not advance the fish value — you end up exactly where you started, having spent the ramps for nothing.
Even at a modest value it is worth taking, because what you are really buying is the higher value on the next one. Once you are up around 50M, missing one hurts less, but by then you have no reason to miss.
Played well, the Monster Fish alone will usually get you to a replay.
Count your fish, and which flipper you are on
This is the detail that separates people who know this machine from people who merely play it well.
Because the ramps feed different flippers, the sixth fish can cost you time you did not need to spend. The trick is to never take the final fish from the right flipper, since getting the ball across to the right wastes seconds of a hurry-up.
So check your count after every ramp. If you have just lit an even-numbered fish from the right flipper, shoot something else from the left — the Long Cast if the captive ball still has value to advance, the Caster's Club if it does not. If you lit an odd-numbered fish from the left, go and take the Fish Finder from the right.
Keep the parity straight and the last fish arrives on the correct flipper without you having to scramble for it.
Rock the Boat and Feeding Frenzy
Rock the Boat makes every boat shot worth 10M for twenty or thirty seconds depending on how you started it. Shoot the ramps, not the captive ball — they are easier, safer, and you can get into a rhythm backhanding the same ramp repeatedly, which is often easier than reaching across for the far one.
The exception people make is when both the extra ball and multiball are lit at the captive ball, where the risk can be worth taking.
Feeding Frenzy is four purple fish on a rolling fifteen-second timer, ending at 20M for the last one and 35M in total. Do not take the easy boat fish first. Go for the awkward looping ones while you have time in hand, and keep a boat fish in reserve to buy yourself another fifteen seconds when the clock gets short.
Two shortcuts help: you only need to trigger the boat ramp sensor rather than the full ramp, so a U-turn collects both boat fish, and the left fish needs no more than the spinner barely turning over.
What not to bother with
Do not aim at the Stringers. They are frequently drain shots, and letting the ball find them on its own is the sensible policy. Go for them deliberately only when you are genuinely close to Rock the Boat — which is worth having — rather than for Feeding Frenzy, which caps at 35M.
In the LIE lanes, work out which lane the ball most often arrives in from the jets, and keep that one unlit using the flipper buttons. It is usually the I. Doing this stops you wasting rollovers on letters you already have, and LIE is worth caring about: it takes your bonus multiplier to 7X, after which each completion pays 5M, 10M, 15M and then 20M.
And during multiball, avoid taking Instant Multiball from the captive ball. It wastes the feature, particularly early, and if you have two balls locked you are far better off starting the regular multiball — Instant Multiball leaves you with no locked balls afterwards.
This machine has to be set up properly
Fish Tales is unusually intolerant of poor setup, and it is worth knowing what a broken one feels like so you do not blame yourself.
The upper-left gate is the main thing. It should open for right-to-left shots only when the Long Cast is lit. Stuck open is a minor nuisance, making LIE harder to complete. Stuck closed is serious: you cannot advance the captive ball value at all except by luck on the Fish Finder, which removes a whole layer of the game.
The other one is the Caster's Club drop target, which should only come up after a jackpot or to block extra balls entering during multiball. If it is up when it should not be, lighting a jackpot takes two hits instead of one and the multiball becomes close to unplayable.
There is also a small piece of rubber at the end of the left loop on many machines that will send a ball straight down the middle. If your local machine does that every time, it is the machine, not you.
Where this came from
Silverball wrote this, but not from scratch: it was compiled against the published rules below and checked against them, rather than written up from one person’s games. None of the wording is theirs. Machines get code updates that move the right shot, so a guide has a date on it for a reason.
- Fish Tales rule sheet (freely distributable; author not recorded in our copy)
