Silverball guide · The Addams Family
The mansion is the machine
The best-selling pinball machine ever made keeps its scoring somewhere most players never look: the end-of-ball bonus. Thirteen rooms is the route there.
Multiball is not the point
Ask a casual player what they are trying to do on The Addams Family and they will say multiball. It is the loudest thing the machine does, the vault is the obvious target, and the jackpot is announced like it matters.
It does not, particularly. Addams pays its real money in the end-of-ball bonus, and the bonus is built from two counters that have nothing to do with multiball: mansion rooms and bear kicks. Five hundred thousand for every room you have collected, a hundred thousand for every bear kick, the whole lot multiplied by up to five. That total keeps growing all game, and it is collected four times.
How to keep the rooms coming
There are thirteen rooms. You collect one by shooting the electric chair or the swamp kickout while the yellow lamp above the chair is lit, and which room you get is whichever one is currently flashing.
The chair is lit at the start of each ball. After that you relight it with the left ramp or the centre ramp — that is the rhythm of the whole game, ramp then chair, ramp then chair. The right inlane lights it too, but only briefly.
The jet bumpers change which room is flashing, moving along the row. This is the part worth using deliberately rather than suffering: if the room you want is two along, a trip through the bumpers gets you there. It is also why a ball rattling around in the graveyard is not wasted time.
Tour the Mansion, and why twelve is the number
Collect twelve rooms and the question mark lights in the attic. You do not need to relight the chair to take it. Shooting it starts Tour the Mansion, which is the closest thing this machine has to a wizard mode.
It pays fifty million on the spot, then re-lights essentially everything: the three money rooms, a maximised graveyard, special in the outlanes, an extra ball at Thing's eject, and then it runs you through Mamushka, Cousin It, Seance, Tunnel Hunt, Raise the Dead and Thing Multiball one after another.
Two warnings. The extra ball and the special are both temporary by default — collect them on that ball or they are gone. And if you have the Seance round running when the Tour begins, the magnets stay on underneath you for the duration, which is as unpleasant as it sounds. Finish Seance, or start the Tour first.
Bear kicks are free rooms
The centre ramp awards a bear kick, or two if you have just come through the near left inlane. They are worth a hundred thousand each in bonus, which is pleasant but not the reason to shoot them.
The reason is that hitting certain totals spots a mansion room outright — including at 55, 65, 75, 85 and 95. A player working the centre ramp is collecting rooms without ever going near the chair.
One catch: you cannot spot the question mark this way. If the question mark is the only room you have left, a bear kick threshold that would have awarded a room simply evaporates. At eleven rooms, keep ramping; at twelve, go and take it.
The restart nobody takes
For multiball, spell GREED on the bookcase to open the vault, then lock. The jackpot is the train wreck target in the back left corner; the super jackpot is the left ramp. Bookcase hits and centre ramp shots push the jackpot up towards its twenty-five million ceiling.
Here is the bit that gets left on the table. If multiball ends without you collecting a jackpot, you have twenty seconds to shoot Thing's eject and get a two-ball restart — with both the jackpot and the super jackpot lit from the off. It is one restart per multiball and it costs nothing to try.
Most players stand there watching the last ball drain instead. Learn where Thing's eject is and take the free go.
Don't forget the multiplier
All of that bonus gets multiplied by between one and five, and the multiplier is advanced at the left loop when Adv X is lit from the right inlane. It resets every ball, and it times out within a few seconds of lighting.
It is the least glamorous shot on the machine and it doubles, triples or quintuples the number that actually decides your game. If you have spent a ball collecting rooms and have not touched the multiplier, you have done the hard half and skipped the easy one.
The train wreck target is worth a mention alongside it: each train wreck stops the graveyard value resetting on the next ball, and four of them lights an extra ball.
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.
- The Addams Family community rule sheet (author not recorded in our copy)
