I don’t know if many of you had this problem, but I couldn’t get the pins to scatter and fall properly no matter how I set the physics simulation settings (mass, friction, bounciness, collision shape).
At best a few direct-hit pins would go flying, leaving most to sway and bob but remain upright.
Well, it turns out that the object origin matters in these sims! I had set the origin to the very bottom centre of the pins because it made it easy to align them with the Z-axis nicely, but it seems like the physics simulation treats the origin as the centre of mass.
Solution: Object > Set Origin > Origin to Center of Mass (Volume) on all of the pins
