AVALANCHE!
By Steve Walters
1982


No documentation seems to be available for AVALANCHE!  This game was played in the Astroacade High Score Club during Season 1, Round 7 (May 2016):

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/252219-hsc01-round-7-bally-pin-pinball/

Paul Thacker posted instructions on how to play the game to the HSC thread on May 7, 2016:


"Avalanche!" (Steve Walters, 1982) looks like a Pachinko game, but rather than a fast-paced, luck-based game of Pachinko, it's actually a turn-based strategic game. The playfield has six slots on the top to drop balls into. The field then widens to eight channels. As you go down the field, you run into a series of levers--three on the top level, then four, three, and four again. Each lever will always be tilted diagonally such that the top of the lever will be either on the left or the right. There are walls between the levers with gaps that let balls switch between channels in certain circumstances.

I'll describe a single-player game here. When the game starts, four balls automatically drop onto the field. The player then has 17 balls which they can always drop into any of the six slots. So, what does a ball do when you drop it? This is entirely predictable based upon the position of the balls and levers. A ball will drop straight down until it encounters an obstacle. If a ball hits the top of a lever, it stops there. If a ball hits the bottom of a lever, it flips the lever to the opposite position, and the ball keeps falling. If a ball hits another ball, it slides to the other side of the lever and keeps falling. Next, it will hit the bottom of the lever and flip the lever. This means the ball that was originally stuck there will start falling, and hit the lever again. Ultimately, both balls fall, and the lever ends up in the same position it started in.

You "score" whenever a ball falls to the very bottom and leaves the field. But the goal of the game is to prevent this. Like golf, you want as low a score as possible. You have to drop all 17 of your balls, so at the end, you want as many as possible to be stuck on the top of a lever. There are 21 balls in play (your 17, plus the 4 dropped initially), but only 14 levers, so you can't keep every ball up. In this example, I ended the game with 9 balls on the levers, for a score of 12 (9 balls saved + 12 balls dropped = 21 balls total).

Perhaps you can do better. Is it possible to end the game with a ball on all 14 levers, for a score of 7?
