Not far from Stop 1 on the Southern arcade road trip, MOMs, is a pizza place 🍕 with a surprisingly large number of pinball machines. What’s not surprising is that the pins played great. That’s because they are maintained by the same dude who maintains MOM’s Organic’s awesome pinball lineup.
VÜK, which is a neat double entendres for a male Slavic name that translates to “Wolf” and a pinball acronym for “Vertical Up Kick” is located in a trendy area of Bethesda, Maryland that gets a lot more foot traffic than a pinball arcade hidden in the back of a grocery store. People young and old were constantly coming in and out of the location, which was nice to see for the hobby.
The newest games of the MOMs stable seem to go to VÜK first. They had an amazing list of pins, even the brand new Stern Pinball Jurassic Park Pro. Here’s a list of the pinball machines courtesy of Pinball Map:
Attack From Mars (Remake) (Special Edition) (Chicago Gaming, 2017)
Black Knight: Sword of Rage (Premium) (Stern, 2019)
Deadpool (Pro) (Stern, 2018)
Game of Thrones (Pro) (Stern, 2015)
Hot Tip (Williams, 1977)
Iron Maiden: Legacy of the Beast (Premium) (Stern, 2018)
Iron Man (Stern, 2010)
Jurassic Park (Pro) (Stern, 2019)
Memory Lane (Stern, 1978)
Monster Bash (Remake LE) (Chicago Gaming, 2018)
Spider-Man (Vault Edition) (Stern, 2016)
The Walking Dead (Pro) (Stern, 2014)
That’s a sick lineup. We played the heck out of Stern’s Black Knight Premium. What a fantastic game Beverly time I play that pin I like it more. Kudos to Tim Sexton, Steve Ritchie and the Stern crew for that masterpiece.
As you can see on the list VÜK has a Williams Hot Tip. The one there is the EM version of the pin. I’ll have more to say about that in the next location review.
As I mentioned the vast majority of the games were working great. Game of Thrones was missing the left flipper button, but I got the impression that it had just happened. That’s the perils of routing games.
All of the games for the most part were $0.50/play. The pizza at VÜK was very good, and that’s coming from a New Yorker. They even served beer.
Rob Miller and I thoroughly enjoyed our time at VÜK. If you go, be prepared to park in the parking garage across the street because street parking is a challenge. The garage is free on the weekends though so that’s no big deal. As I said, the pizza was good but if you aren’t into that the area has a TON of great restaurants and even a brewery within walking distance. So you can always go for the pins and dine elsewhere.
Here’s 40 pictures of VÜK. For more, hop on over to the Knapp Arvade Instagram account @knapparcade. This was stop 3 of a 6 😳 stop trip. Make sure to follow for the upcoming reviews. Thanks for reading 🙂.