Some of my favorite long term keeper pins are purchased before ever playing. The great thing about pinball today is we have streams and videos to help make up our mind. If you’re an experienced player, and know what you like, you can typically know from a video and reviews whether you’ll like it or not. A dozen plays on a location game can be deceiving on whether it would make a good home only pin or not.

That said, $10k is a lot of coin whether you play it before or not. The good news is, JJPOTC is ceasing production for an undisclosed amount of time, so you really shouldn’t be too fearful of losing much money. You’d probably lose more flying to a big pinball show haha! Your biggest worry should be how much you have to tweak this pin and be under the hood rather than knowing if it’s good or not.

It’s only rumor and speculation at this point as to why they are ceasing production. From the distributors I talked to and/or listened to; they’ve said that Jack has not confirmed (or denied really) that it’s a license issue. Rather, it’s exactly what everyone has been saying in that they are preping the line for WOZ YBR and Wonka. I imagine after the WOZs are built, and there’s still demand, they’ll go back to JJPOTC.

That all said, here’s my theory, and again speculation - but a little of both. I’m guessing this title did actually sell better than people think and they are closing in on the 1000 LE mark and that their licensing team didn’t secure JJP to do another version of the game like they did with WOZ and Hobbit. So it makes sense to push the next pins onto the line until they can secure another version of JJPOTC. Again, this is just my speculative opinion. If history has taught us anything about JJP, they are very good at releasing multiple versions of a title.

I think it’s easier to learn than BM66.

The good news on Pirates ceasing production is that it shouldn’t be too hard to move if it’s not your cup of tea.