have fun.

i might be around. have some fam in town, so may need to navigate that. haven't seen ya since TxPinFest

cheers

There is pinball castle on 35 around buda as well. Never been there but sold them a wozecle a few weeks ago. Suppose to have 20-30 pinz.

Chris Kruger

Unless they tightened up their ship in the last month, I wouldn't recommend Pinball Kingdom. IMHO it's a pale immitation of the original Pinballz location. Only 35-ish pinballs compared to 100+ at the original location, the pins were in much worse condition than the original pinballz (5-ish pins of those 35-ish were turned off, about half of the rest were dirty and not functioning well), and I lost about 5 bucks in the coin mechs (they refunded me). I talked to the manager there and he was pretty frustrated as well. He started at the original location and got moved to Kingdom. He said they aren't allowed to do any repairs on the machines themselves (even though he was trained to do so at the original Pinballz) and that the repair guy only comes once a week for an hour or two. I have to drive from San Antonio if I wanna go and I'll gladly take the extra 20-30 minutes to drive past this place and on to the original Pinballz location.

Please please bring a box of your boards and install them on the machines at Pinballz. MB needs one for sure, I'm certain others.

Hey Rob, if you are in town this weekend you should come to Buffalo Billiards (201 E 6th St)
We have 12 pins, including the new KISS. If your available to come in either Saturday or Sunday (Sunday is our league day as well)
I would like to chat with you. I'm the guy with the Addams family that seems to be eating your reset boards for lunch, maybe you can help me figure out why that machine is destroying your boards (the one on STTNG is still working flawlessly.)
Feel free to DM me here.

+1000000%

Stopped off there when traveling through Buda and it was a complete and utter waste of time unless you were looking to play redemption games. Most of the games there, at the time I went, were in rough shape or non-functional. And I don't mean, small things not working correctly. One example would be the garage door on TSPP that wasn't working at all. I told the staff about it and an hour later it was still on and collecting peoples money. Sorry Darin (if you are reading this), but after that I turned it off myself and told the staff I did so and why.

Pinballz is still a good trip but be advised that the condition of their games has struggled as well. I truly understand it is hard to keep this many machines up and running but it's much worse now than it was before they opened Pinball Kingdom.

Check out Buffalo Billiards if you are near downtown. It has a nice collection and the games are in much better shape.

I witnessed this there too with broken flippers. I was quite disappointed in that, even though my family had a good time.

I agree. I was in Austin a month ago and went to Pinballz, Pinball Kingdom, and Buffalo Billiards. Pinballz was straight up awesome with so many pins under one roof. Some pins were not working well but overall very impressive. Pinball Kingdom had a bunch of pins that didn't work but did have a nice Funhouse. It was a bit of a drive from Pinballz to Pinball Kingdom and not worth the trip. Buffalo Billiards was a really cool place and centrally located. Not a ton of pins but the ones they had were great pins. I did not have much time so only played a handful of games.

Pinballz has been having trouble finding techs for their South location/Pinballz Kingdom. From what I understand, most of the techs are part time employees that have jobs at other tech companies in the area, and most of those are in North Austin. An hour each way on I35 for a three-four hour shift is no picnic.

95% of the machines at Pinballz North are in good shape, they've been better at turning off machines with issues recently and will generally refund tokens if you ask. If you drop $10 worth of tokens in different machines you'll probably run into some kind of problem though. If you get there before Noon they're still doing a $15 for $10 token deal, ask about it.

Buffalo is a great spot, although Friday/Saturday nights can be tough to get around. Even more so since Uber took off and everything from 1st to 9th street is a mess of hazard lights and high heels on weekend nights. Better that people aren't driving themselves, I guess. Afternoon and early evening is great, and their staff are awesome. I recommend the chicken tenders and Live Oak Hefeweizen.

The Tenders are awesome, but we don't carry Live Oak. It's Blur, from Circle brewing.

Ah, but if you do one part Devil's Backbone to four parts Blur, it's pretty much LOH, right?

I stand corrected. Circle is great as well.

I'm hoping for a beer list refresh sometime. The hop overboard is fine, but it's unfortunate that's the only one I'll drink.

For food, it's all about the italian beef sandwich - just get a lot of napkins to go along with it!

Yeah, it's not the best sandwich for playing pinball...
Currently the beer selection is being reviewed, we are getting an entire new draft system soon, it will add one additional tap, and as always I monitor what is selling and what isn't. If something stops selling I'll replace it.

hola,

sorry i couldn't make it. had full-time family in-town going on. hanging out at pinballz would have been more fun

It was great to meet you and your brother, hope you can find time to comeback and visit often.