- description
- The playfield's guided channels — narrow tracks, usually bounded by plastic or metal rails, that carry the ball along a fixed path rather than letting it roll freely across the open field. The category spans the [[gameplay-feature:outlanes]] and [[gameplay-feature:inlanes]] flanking the [[gameplay-feature:flippers]], the [[gameplay-feature:top-lanes]] crossing the upper playfield, the [[gameplay-feature:shooter-lanes]] that launches the ball into play, and the sweeping [[gameplay-feature:orbits]] that loop around the upper playfield, as well as specialized variants like [[gameplay-feature:kicker-lanes]], [[gameplay-feature:horseshoe-lanes]] and [[gameplay-feature:flex-save-lanes]].
Lanes have been a standard building block of pinball playfields since the format's earliest days and appear on the overwhelming majority of machines regardless of era or manufacturer, so common that this catalog mostly does not track which machines have them.