Plinko vs Mines, Aviator and Chicken Road: which instant game does what

The four games in one table

All four run at offshore casinos; online casinos are not licensed in Australia.

What each game asks of you

Plinko asks for three decisions before the drop, rows, risk and stake, and none after it. The ball’s path is fixed by the seeds the moment you bet, and the odds of every pocket are known exactly. There’s nothing to time and nothing to stop. That makes it the easiest of the four to understand and the hardest to fool yourself about.

Mines is a 5×5 grid with stars and mines. Spribe describes the goal simply: “open as many stars as possible and don’t blow up on the mine” ⁵. You set the number of mines (1 to 20 in Spribe’s demo) and can cash out after every safe tile ⁶. The odds of each next tile are pure arithmetic: with 3 mines and 25 tiles, the first pick is safe 22 times in 25. The published maximum odds are 5,044,291×, but “the maximum win is limited by the operator” ⁶; in the demo that limit is 10,000.

Aviator is the crash game. “When round starts, a scale of multiplier starts growing. Player must cash out before lucky plane flies away” ³. The multiplier starts at 1× and climbs until a random point; your job is to press cash-out first. Spribe publishes 97% RTP but no maximum multiplier ^{3 4}. The name is also a Lincoln SUV; this page is about the game.

Chicken Road puts a chicken on a multi-lane road: “get through as many lines covers as possible without getting fried. You can withdraw your winnings at any stage of the game” ⁸. Four difficulty levels change the number of lines, 24 on Easy, 22 on Medium, 20 on Hard and 15 on Hardcore ⁸. InOut Games lists a 98% RTP and a release date of 4 April 2024 ⁷.

The number that separates them: RTP

On published figures, BGaming’s Plinko returns the most (98.91% to 99.16%), Chicken Road next (98%), then Spribe’s three games at 97% each. The spread from 97% to 99% is worth about $20 per $1,000 staked over a long run. Within Plinko, remember that BGaming and Spribe differ by the same two points; the version comparison has the detail.

RTP is only half the picture, because the cash-out games hand part of the maths to you. In Mines or Aviator, cashing out early every time gives a low, steady result; holding on gives a volatile one. The house edge stays the same whatever you choose, just as Plinko’s risk level moves the swing without moving the average.

Pace: how fast the house edge works

All four are quick. A Plinko drop takes a couple of seconds, and BGaming’s Auto mode runs up to 1,000 drops in a row. Aviator rounds are a few seconds to a minute, Mines and Chicken Road last as long as your nerve. On autoplay any of them can run several hundred rounds an hour, and a 1% to 3% edge applied several hundred times an hour adds up faster than the small number suggests. The pace, not the RTP, is what empties a balance in a bad session. The strategy page shows what 1,000 Plinko drops did in practice.

Provably fair across all four

Spribe uses the same method for Plinko, Mines and Aviator: a server seed committed in advance, a client seed from your device, and a SHA-512 hash that fixes the result. BGaming and InOut Games describe their own versions of the idea. What the check proves, and what it doesn’t, is on our provably fair page. In every case it confirms the result wasn’t changed after your bet; it never changes the house edge.

Australia and the providers’ own restrictions

Spribe and BGaming don’t list Australia as restricted on their public pages. InOut Games does: Australia appears on its restricted-countries page ⁹, so Chicken Road shouldn’t be offered to an Australian account by a lobby that follows the provider’s rules. Stake’s terms bar Australian residents from its whole service, in-house Plinko included. None of that changes the baseline: online casinos are not licensed in Australia, and the checks worth doing before any deposit are on the real-money page.