Arcades in Wellington

Looking for flashing lights and high scores in Wellington, Wellington? There are 2 arcades mapped here. That's 2 arcades mapped around Wellington. Machine condition varies wildly between venues, so the one with the best-maintained cabinets wins regardless of size. Check whether the venue runs on tokens, cards or coins before you arrive with the wrong currency.

This guide covers every arcade we could verify in and around Wellington (within about 40 km), built from OpenStreetMap's community-maintained data. Names you'll run into include Ye Olde Pinball Shoppe and Timezone. If an arcade's missing from Wellington's list, it probably just hasn't been mapped yet.

The Wellington arcade lineup

2 mapped within about 40 km:

What the map tells us about arcades in Wellington

1 of the 2 list their opening hours on the map, which is genuinely useful — arcades keep long hours, so the listed times are usually good.

The one mapped arcade sits on 18A Bond Street — worth combining with whatever else brings you to that side of town.

The Wellington arcade run

The efficient Wellington arcade run strings these together: Ye Olde Pinball Shoppe on 18A Bond Street and Timezone — 2 stops, one logical order.

Arcade tips for Wellington

Hitting the arcades in Wellington? Play smarter:

• Watch the regulars first at Ye Olde Pinball Shoppe. The high-score table tells you which machines are hot and who's worth watching. Fifteen minutes of watching teaches plenty.
• The classics are cheapest at Timezone. Pac-Man, Galaga, the old cabinets — usually the lowest price per play and still the most fun per minute.
• Learn the ticket-to-prize math. Glance at the prize counter before playing ticket games. If the math horrifies you, play the video games instead.
• Check the retro corner. The old cabinets in the back are often the best-maintained — they're somebody's pride and joy.

Good to know

We searched about 40 km around Wellington — that covers the town itself plus the surrounding communities you'd reasonably drive to. Listings come from OpenStreetMap, mapped by local volunteers, so a brand-new arcade in Wellington can take a while to appear. The 2 above are only as current as the community map. A arcade that's shut, or a new one nobody's added yet, gets fixed with a single OpenStreetMap edit.

We don't list machine lineups — they change too often. What we list is the where: real venues, verified by real mappers.

If you run one of the 2 listed here and something's wrong — a closure, a move, new hours — the fix is the same: update the shop on OpenStreetMap and the correction flows through to this page on the next daily refresh.