Gold Strike

Gold Strike is the add-a-ball version of El Dorado, with slightly different rules.

Drop targets galore. Shoot the lit ones for 5,000, unlit ones are only 500. There’s a good amount of strategy and ball control required to get the most out of the target banks.

The drop target lights are synchronized. At all times, exactly three positions will be lit, e.g. the top horse on the lower 5-bank, the left-most cactus on the upper 10-bank and the 6th target from the right on the upper bank. Hitting the center star rollover moves the trio one position to the right (and scores 1,000).

The A-B-C lanes each light one of the upper right lanes above the top bumper for 5000: A the left one, B the center, C the right lane. It’s a good idea to try to get all three lanes lit. Completing all three lights the stand-up targets. Unlike El Dorado, the A-B-C lanes themselves are never worth 5000, they’re just 1000 at all times.

Key Feeds: watch the three feeds on this machine carefully\! When the ball comes down the left lane into the left bumper [feed 1], does it tend to come to the left, meaning either a drain out the left or a feed the left return lane, or come out the right, to either the left flipper or down the center? You’ll need to be nudging either way but check its natural tendencies first.

When the ball comes down the right side, it can be moving slow if it fell through the left of the two lanes [feed 2] and hits the right wall or rattles unevenly down the right lane, or it can be moving faster if it falls cleanly down the right lane [feed 3]. Again, where does each tend to go? If the clean fall comes out fast enough to reach the left flipper, don’t nudge. If the slow fall comes out and thinks about slipping to the right towards the inlane/outlane divider, nudge.

The drop targets on the right are rarely backhandable, but you can often do a “well-timed-flying-backhand” into them when the ball is coming to the right flipper. If it looks like the ball is headed that way in such a manner that you’re not likely to be able to trap it on the flipper, give this a try.

Also unlike El Dorado, the return lanes and outlanes when lit score only 1000, not 5000. With neither the ABC nor the return lanes going up to high value, the importance of shooting the lit drop targets and getting the upper right lanes lit and scored is even higher than on El Dorado.

Further complicating your task is what happens when you complete both target banks. You get 5000 for doing so, but at that point, the value of hitting a lit drop target changes to scoring an extra ball. Unless extra balls have been set to award points instead, that makes them useless to you and means no drop targets are worth more than 500 points for the rest of that ball, when the extra ball feature resets.