doubles pinball

Pinball is more fun with friends, and as a result, multiplayer games are supported on nearly every machine built in the last few decades, and some of the ones before that. However, I find that games with more than two players tend to have too much time between your turns to play, with the result that you lose all the continuity of a normal game, so doubles pinball is probably the best.

This effect may have been exaggerated by the fact that the only friends I ever played multiplayer pinball games with on a regular basis were anywhere from moderately good to extremely good players, so ball times were sometimes way out of the norm. My writeup in the pinball and sex hypothesis has one story of a particularly long multiplayer game.

You can also play doubles pinball with two players at once, one on each flipper. This works best if the team involved likes each other enough to cooperate at juking the machine around. (As for the pinball and sex hypothesis implications, my boyfriend and I sometimes play doubles pinball with our arms around each other's waists to better follow each other's movements, but alternatively the teammates can agree beforehand who'll be the dominant partner... I mean, in charge of shaking the machine. I digress.)

Multiplayer games (by which I mean those with more than two players involved) are much more fun when played in this style; my friends and generally I play rotating strictly in one direction, tagging in and/or out only when a new ball comes into play, but on more daring days we switch at every ramp and ball lock, or even every given opportunity. If more than three people are playing, the situation is likely to degenerate into full contact pinball... not that there's anything wrong with that.