Silverball guide · Rick and Morty
A dimension can make your game worse, and you choose to go
Charge the portal gun and shoot a garage entrance and you shift dimension. Some dimensions boost your shots, some change the machine's behaviour against you, and you cannot come back until the charge runs out.
Dimensions are a gamble you opt into
Hits to the spinner and other shots charge Rick's portal gun. With enough charge, either garage entrance shifts you into an alternate dimension, and the charge then depletes while you are there until you are dumped back home.
The dimensions fall into three kinds: cosmetic ones that change the lighting and music, positive ones that add score modifiers to shots, and negative ones that alter the machine's mechanical behaviour or cut what your shots pay. Visiting three of them lights an extra ball at the spinner loop, which is reason enough to accept the occasional bad one.
Stamps come whether you finish or not
Adventures are the main modes, tracked on the Morty Adventure Card above the flippers. Here is the part worth knowing: you get a stamp for an adventure even if you drain during it. Complete it instead and the stamp is green.
So a failed adventure is not a wasted one. Starting adventures is itself progress, which argues for starting them freely rather than waiting for a tidy ball.
Meeseeks can divide your score as well as multiply it
The Meeseeks Box target on the far right spawns a Meeseeks at a random shot. Shoot that lit shot and the Meeseeks moves to the display and applies enhanced scoring to it.
The word in the rules is 'or divided', and that is not a typo. This is a machine that is quite prepared to make a shot worth less than it was. Read what is on the display before you commit to a lane.
Qualifying an adventure gets steadily dearer
The left and right ramps carry purple Start Adventure lights. On default settings the first adventure needs only one of the two ramps, and every adventure after that needs both.
Adventures start at the centre scoop and each gives a ten second ball save. That timer freezes while the ball is locked and resumes when it is back in play, which means there is real strategy in when you start a mode rather than just whether you can.
Gromflomite Battle, and the crank
One hit on the Flooble Crank qualifies a side of the Danesi lock. Lock a ball and another crank hit lights the other side. With two locked, the centre scoop flashes green and starts the multiball, and the first jackpot lights a super at the garage.
Three more crank hits during the multiball add a ball, with ten seconds of extra save, and you get exactly one add-a-ball per continuous multiball no matter how many you stack into it.
The magna-save on the right outlane
The anti-gravity battery is a proper Williams-style magna-save, worked with the extra flipper button on the right, with the magnet under the A in SLAM.
You toggle it on and off to steer a ball leaving down the right outlane back into play. It is a skill rather than a button press, and on a machine where dimensions can actively work against you it is the thing keeping a good ball alive.
Stack the adventure into the multiball
Starting an adventure on top of the multiball start combines the two ball save timers, and makes progress in the adventure considerably easier.
Even if you are not in a mode, the ramps still qualify your next one during multiball. You cannot start it there, but you can have it waiting for the moment the multiball ends, which stops the usual dead patch afterwards.
Morty gets one pick in ten
Complete nine adventures and the tenth start brings up the adventure selector, where you choose freely from all of them.
Any adventure you have not already completed is available there with multiplied scoring. So the nine before it are not just progress, they are setting the price of the tenth.
Somebody can take your multiball
In a multiplayer game another player can steal your locks, but not for free. If you have balls locked, their horseshoe lights orange to show the locks are shielded, and they need an extra Flooble Crank hit for each ball you have locked.
And your locks are remembered. If yours are stolen, they stay lit and available to you on your next ball. It is a fairer version of a mechanic that used to hand a free multiball to whoever was standing there next.
Locks time out, faster each time
After the first multiball, lit locks slowly fade and expire, and the fade gets quicker with every subsequent multiball until the sixth, where it settles at its fastest.
So the leisurely approach to collecting locks works exactly once. After that, a lit lock is something to spend rather than bank.
What to do on a first game
Shoot the spinner, because it charges the portal gun and the extra ball behind three dimensions is one of the more reachable ones on the machine.
Start adventures rather than saving them, since the stamp comes either way. And take the Flooble Crank whenever it is in front of you, because it is the entrance to the multiball and the add-a-ball inside it.
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.
- Rick and Morty rule sheet (author not recorded in our copy)