You know you want it - Vacation America

Now's your chance to impress your pinhead friends. Or garner their sympathy and ridicule. Be THE owner of a Vacation America pinball:

https://pinside.com/pinball/archive/vacation-america/owners

The game is certifiably HUO. I don't use this term lightly. Check out the coin door pic if you have any doubts. Nope, no quarters ever went into this game.

The game is 100% working and at least 33.33% fun.

I'm asking $450 but reasonable offers over $1000 will be entertained and quickly accepted. I'm not shipping the game. You will have to drive across the country to pick up this gem. It will be worth it.

Now that we have some, but not all of the snarky comments out of the way, let's get to some specifics. Vacation America is a home model pinball made by Chicago Gaming (not Chicago Coin as the archive states) around 2003/2004. It was designed by John Trudeau and Steve Kordek. More info can be found here:
http://www.pinballnews.com/news/churchill.html

Ken Layton was kind enough to share some information on Pinwiki:
http://www.pinwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chicago_Gaming

Chicago Gaming owns Churchill Cabinets. Churchill is the supplier of Stern's cabinets and playfields. The point I'm getting to is this game has a standard cabinet body and standard plywood playfield as you'd find in a Stern pin. Hey, they even painted the entire inside of the cabinet! Take that, Stern! The backbox is a little different, basically a standard backbox rotated on its side. The cabinet is in nice shape, I don't see any issues or problems.

Flippers are standard Williams flipper mechs. Note the "OK" masking tape inspection sticker in the photo of the left flipper mech. I don't think Raul ever touched this game.

Pop bumpers, slingshots, and other mechs are slightly different than what you find in other games, but they work in the same manner, nothing strange. They use optical switches for triggering, but standard parts will most likely be able to keep the game going.

Targets are are regular stand up targets and the playfield switches are a dual opto sender/receiver unit. The trough has standard infrared optical LEDs as seen on WMS pins of the 90s.

The game does have a ruleset and has a 2 or 3 ball multiball. The point is to visit all the cities on the map. It isn't a deeply involved end goal, but it is difficult. One thing that makes it somewhat difficult is the flippers are STRONG. I'm guessing that CG erred on the side of caution and made them overly strong knowing the game would receive minimal attention and service.

Another oddity of the game is it uses 658 wedge bulbs for general illumination. This is a low power 12v bulb that is difficult to find. It also uses 447 bulbs in the playfield inserts. This is a low power 555 equivalent. I'm including six of the 658 bulbs and a full box of 447 bulbs so you don't have to look for them like I did. I'm going to recommend that you don't use higher power bulbs than what originally came in the game. I'm saying this because the way the boards are laid out and daisy chained, you don't want to stress the connectors at the end of the chain by drawing more current than is absolutely necessary.

Say what you want about this game, it actually does a pretty good job of what was intended. The family I got this from played the hell out of it. It was filthy and you can tell by the shooter lane that it didn't sit in a corner and not get used.

Finally, I've enjoyed getting acquainted with this game and bringing it back to working condition. Kind of fun to see something different and learn about it.