All 3 are great. I pick Taxi.

All 3 are great games! Ive had 2 Taxi. Looking for a 3rd. Love that game. Should not have sold either of them.

I would pick Whirlwind over Earthshaker but my pick is Mousin Around. I've only had a chance to play it a few times but it's a lot of fun. Taxi is good fun as well. Really can't go wrong with any of those classic games. I don't think it matters if games are kinda similar. All that matters is if they are fun to play a lot.

Taxi Taxi

Earthshaker all day, every day.

All 3 are good picks as well as Whirlwind. Tough choice to pick only 1 of them. If all 4 of these choices (Whirlwind included) were available at the same time, I'd go with Mousin' Around.

Mousin
Taxi
Shakes
All fun games.

Tough call between taxi and mousin, earth shaker would be last on list for me

I've owned Earthshaker and regret letting it go. I own Taxi and Mousin Around. Can't really go wrong with any of them in my opinion but I'd probably take Taxi over them all if I had to pick one, but luckily I don't!

Mousin' Around

Have you considered Whirlwind? Similar rules to Earthshaker, but deeper and more refined. Kinda feels like an early WPC with the cellar rewards and early style "everything is lit" wizard mode that Lawlor would go on to be famous for.

Like you say, Taxi and Fish Tales are similar feeling, might be too similar in a small collection, but it sounds like you really like it. Mousin' Around is a great choice, but it has easy exploits in the rules regarding that center ramp. Still a great game though.

I recently bough ES so that would be my answer. Wouldn't mind having MA but most are beat and parts are hard to find. Little chance for a playfield repro run.

Earthshaker

All three are great. Taxi and Mousin are two of the best Sys 11 games, outside of Whirlwind. Earthshaker is fun as well.

I’ve played them all and love Sys11 games, and although I think Taxi is the best playing game of the three, I think the art, colors, and glass on ES is the best of the three...If I had to pick I think I’d go ES slightly over Taxi just based on looks alone...pretty shallow huh?!

Mousin
Taxi
Earthshaker

Be an easy call on taxi for me. Very simple, hard, fun game. Mousing around is decent and I've never been a fan of earthshaker but chicas like it.

Earthshaker & Taxi are very close...but living in CA gets ES the win. Great theme for The Flipper Room too!

I vote Taxi I think it's a fun challenging game whith lots of different ways to play it. Mohsin Around you can left loop all day which becomes boring and ES you can just shoot center ramp all day.

YO TAXI !!!

I own all 3. They're all great titles. My 1st choice would be Whirlwind, oh wait.... that wasn't an option, sorry

1st Mousin Around
then Taxi or ES tied for 2nd & 3rd.

You really can't go wrong with any of them... all are excellent choices!

Personally I find Taxi is comfortably the better game of your 3 options, but yep there are obvious similarities with Fish Tales.

I’d look at Whirlwind, in my opinion the best Sys 11 pin made. Mousing is a cracker, Earthshaker I don’t care for.

always earthshaker one of my fav games!

Pinside has them rated as Taxi first, earthshaker second, and mousin around last (by a large margin).
I would have to go ahead and agree with taxi being the best of those 3.

I think there are tons of great system 11 games, however...and many are criminally underrated. Take a look at pinbot, diner, and grand lizard as well. People love whirlwind, but it doesn't do it for me for whatever reason.

Taxi
Mousin

ES

I agree that WW is a great system 11, but I find myself going to my Taxi or MA first. I've owned probably north of 15 different Sys 11 games, and those 4 mentioned are the only ones left.

I've owned an Earthshaker and it becomes old pretty quickly. The center ramp is an easy and repeatable shot and the way the code is there really isn't much incentive to play for the multiball. I sold my Earthshaker after a few months. Taxi is a much better game, IMHO. I also have a Whirlwind and I think Whirlwind is better than either Taxi or Earthshaker.

Taxi is a fantastic game. Only reason I let mine go is because I traded it for Mousin'. I never really cared for Earthshaker. It just felt like the player was beat over the head with the theme and the gameplay and limited jackpot collect got old after a couple games.

Whirlwind is the best system 11 game but it's not really because it stands on it's own as the best, it's more because of what it's ruleset evolved into with later releases like Funhouse and Addams. It's like saying High Speed is better than Firepower. Of course it is! No one cares that it's a "system 6" and High Speed is the first "system 11", completely rewriting and understanding what it takes to design a good pinball, moving forward. Whatever came after that machine had to top the next one in a way that required a huge step forward in thinking.

I mean, if you want the honest truth, Whirlwind is the overall best game up to that point in time in the entire history of pinball. Is that what you should buy? Probably not because it may not make you a happy pinball owner and, using that thinking, you should just buy Funhouse, or AFMr for that matter.

It's still a Sys 11

Right. But if it was a Gottlieb, would anyone even care? Or does it just happen to be a system 11 "by default" because that's what was around at the time?

I have all the games in question here and would say Earthshaker is the weakest. I love the art and music but it does get very easy after a while. I picked Mousin in the poll but you could flip a coin between it and Taxi and either way you would come out with a solid game.

I’m not sure what your point is, dividing games by era is convenient so we can discuss what games stand out from that era. Of course a newer game is likely going to have more features than an older one as technology evolved. If you look at comparable boardsets though you are discussing similar technology levels.

Mousin has a great art package, it's different, almost in a Warner Bros cartoon way. The rule set is very simple, but it's fun and always challenging. Those two trap shots are a blast.

Taxi is another simple rule set game, but like BSD, it makes you want to come back to play some more.

i own a earthshaker, i think its an amazing game, i also love taxi. haven't spent any time on a mousin around but i think all 3 are great games.

Es forever.
I've beat it up and down and its one of the few games I don't get sick of despite it being fairly simple. I am not sure why.

It's bitchen

Do you have a Earthshaker in your collection?

For years.

It's been moving back and forth between a friend's and my place, but it always seems to come home.

He's got it out on location at a brewery at the moment to share with the world and it gets a couple hundred dollars a week coin drop, so the world has spoken.

Taxi and Mousin' are both up there as my favorite System 11 games. Taxi definitely beats Mousin' in art and music (Though Mousin' has great music as well), but gameplay I'm not so sure. Taxi is always fun, but I feel like Mousin' is a bit more interesting, especially since it has a per-player jackpot instead of one that carries over game-to-game like Taxi does. It's also got a timed double scoring feature which adds an extra layer of strategy to the game (I have yet to get a double jackpot on mine). I can't say whether or not the center ramp is OP because it's missing on my game, but I can safely say it's still a blast even without the center ramp.

Parts availability for Mousin' could be an issue, although the ball eater assembly can now be 3D printed on-demand through ShapeWays, so that part is no longer unobtanium. I'm still waiting for a ramp assembly to show up though, none of the ramp parts are available anywhere right now...

I also really like Earthshaker, but it definitely doesn't have nearly as much depth as Taxi or Mousin'. It probably has my favorite playfield layout of the games though and the music and sound is also fantastic.

Taxi is just a more boring Fish Tales. You made the right decision. MA is great and on my wishlist. I miss my Fish Tales.

No need to start that group. I'm sure there are hundreds of those across the country.

You damn sure can't go wrong with a real nice Mousin!