Happy 8th Birthday, GOhio! @ Pins Mechanical!!! 🎂 🎈 🍨 🎁 💐 🧁 🎉 🥳 🍰 🪅 📅

GOhio! turns 8!! 🥳 Come celebrate with us at Pins Mechanical! 😄

Summary

Pins Mechanical Co. is a social entertainment venue that combines old-school games like duckpin bowling, pinball, and other classic arcade and table games with craft cocktails, local beers, and punch. The vintage-industrial atmosphere is designed for playful, face-to-face gatherings with friends, family, and colleagues, offering a casual and lively alternative to a typical bar.

Pins' Easton location spans over 38,000 square feet, making it the largest in the United States. This massive entertainment venue features two floors, a mezzanine level with stadium seating, and three full-service bars. It offers 16 duckpin bowling lanes, two indoor bocce courts, and more than 60 classic and modern pinball and arcade games. For additional fun, the location is known for its two outdoor patios, an indoor slide, and an expanded patio pong setup.

Activities

As noted below, some machines take actual quarters. Pins has two change machines (one downstairs and one upstairs) that accept ones, fives, or tens (only), and return quarters (only).

• Duckpin Bowling

Like Bowling but with smaller balls, stubby pins, and no oil on the lanes. The cost is $9 per game per person.

• Pinball

Who's a wizard on these retro machines? At $1 per play, everyone! Takes quarters.

• Arcade

Play classics like Gorf, Pac-Man, Gorf, Donkey Kong, Gorf, Galaga, and Gorf! The best part is, there's Gorf! And all the arcade games are free!

• Patio Pong

The classic college party staple but bigger. Instead of tossing a ping pong ball into cups, you use a regular ball and oversized buckets. There are two of these upstairs, and they're both free!

• Ping Pong

The most popular sport in China! They have two ping pong tables downstairs and two more ping pong tables upstairs. For those of you who have studied topological spaces and set theory, you will know this means they have four total ping pong tables.

They have bubble gum dispensers with ping pong balls in them for 25¢ each. The dispensers take quarters. However, they also have racks where they store the ping pong paddles, and in these racks are slots for ping pong balls. It's not uncommon to see balls already here, so there's a chance you may be able to play ping pong for free if you want to.

• Hookie

You can't put your eye out! The safe alternative to darts: Hook thrown rings on a board. Outdoors on the upstairs patio, and free!

• Bocce

Like bowling, except there’s turf and a lot more balls. You can also knock your opponent’s balls out of the way. There are two of these upstairs, and they're both free!

• Foosball

Everyone loves foosball! 50¢ a game. Takes quarters.

• Giant Jenga

Stack massive wooden blocks into a tower, then take turns pulling out one block at a time without collapsing the tower. There are four of these sprinkled throughout the venue (two downstairs and two upstairs, with one on each patio), and they're all free!

• Skeeball

There are three skeeball machines on the first floor (near the Gorf machine!), and they're all free!

• Giant Connect Four

On the outdoor patio upstairs, and free!

• Bubble Hockey

This is upstairs. Up to four people can play at once, and it costs $1. Takes quarters.

• Cornhole

There are two cornhole lanes upstairs, and they're both free!

• Basketball

There are two basketball machines downstairs. They're tucked behind the downstairs bar, so they're not always obvious unless you go look for them. They're $2 per play, and they take quarters.

• NES and Sega Genesis video games

These are collections, downstairs (near the Gorf machine!), of video games that you can play for free!

• The Big Metal Indoor Slide

This large two-story slide is for kids, and certainly no adults would ride this. After all, it's not like it's free or anything.

Outdoor Patio

Pins at Easton actually has two outdoor patios. But for our purposes, only the upstairs one matters. See, it will be winter and likely cold. But their upstairs patio has multiple ceiling heaters and two massive gas fire pits that put out a ton of heat. Sitting out here may be a real option.

As mentioned above, the upstairs outdoor patio has one of the venue's two Patio Pong setups, one of their multiple Giant Jengas, the Giant Connect Four, and Hookie.

Food

Pins doesn't serve food, but there's a Mikey's Late Night Slice next door. This Mikey's is basically an extension of the Easton Pins; there's a large open doorway between both establishments. Mikey's has a fountain dispenser with Coke products.

You can also get Coke and Diet Coke (but not Coke Zero, like you can at Mikey's) at the bars in Pins, but I think the quality of the soda pop from Mikey's fountain is better than that from the bar hoses Pins uses to dispense soft drinks.

You are also quite allowed at Pins to either bring food in or order it in via your favorite delivery app.

Parking

I recommend parking in the Worth Garage. It's literally right next door to Pins, and it's free as long as you park on Level 2 or above.

They recently started charging people to park on Level 1, and you pay for parking on this level the same way you pay for street parking in Columbus, with the ParkColumbus app.

I've seen them enforce this by ticketing people's cars, but I don't know how they actually compel payment. The garage is not a public street that actual cops can write you tickets for parking illegally on. If you have an actual ticket from a cop that you don't pay, they can go so far as to issue a warrant for your arrest. But all Easton has, seemingly, is, "Please pay our ticket." Still, in my ongoing efforts to eliminate needless stress and aggravation from my life, I just park above the first Level.

The actual address of the garage is 4049 Worth Ave, Columbus, OH 43219. However, your GPS is stupid. The actual entrances to the garage are on the cross steets Brighton Rose Way and Fenlon St, not Worth Ave. Just keep this in mind once you get to the garage.

Where we'll meet

I'll post in the comments where I am. People will obviously want to explore different areas of the venue over the course of the event (and there's a lot to explore), but please just let me know (as in, come find me) once you've arrived.

Peroration

Come on out and say hi! 😄