Grown up fun: arcade games + booze: Eighty Two, LA

I must confess, I love games- arcade games, board games, card games, fair games, all of them. Combine that with booze and I am a pretty happy girl.

We first found Eighty Two about 5 years ago, no idea how but Probably googling different places to go in LA. It’s down in the Arts District and to put it into perspective, when we went 5 years ago our taxi driver was not happy to go down there at midnight/ 1am, how times have changed. Anyway, now the Arts District is full of awesome stuff and plenty of people go down there, it’s one of my favourite areas. With Jax over and her brother here for a couple of days Eighty Two was a must.

You’ll find normal bar offerings and a stack of arcade games that you can play for quarters. We started off with pinball, absolute classic. Except these are pinball machines on steroids with all sorts of crazy things happening in them. You’ll easily drop a couple of dollars just working out what the hell you are doing. You can see the concentration in the pics.

For me it was then the classics: Donkey Kong, Frogger, Space Invaders and some other ones that I had no idea what was going on, like Joust. Basically I like games that aren’t overly complicated and you can still feel like you are playing even when you don’t have any particular skill at games. I also love shootem up games which Al and I dumped another few dollars plus it’s about the only game that I can sometimes beat him in 😜

I’m pretty sure Jax and Martin spent most of their time on space invaders, which I am guessing was mainly Martin: Jax’s attention span and skill at games is worse than mine. Though in all fairness, I think she lasted the longest on pinball.

As per LA usual,you’ll find a taco truck outside that looked good and Seoul Sausage has a truck in the courtyard of the bar but we were too stuffed from our dinner to test them out, that’ll have to be another time.

After a playing a few games we thought we’d best introduce Martin to Angel City Brewery: fast becoming one of our favorites for a cruisy afternoon (so what if it wasn’t actually afternoon 😝) You can’t go to Angel City without playing a few old school games- plus it went with our theme for the evening. We started with some Trouble where, quite frankly, brought out some of our nasty sides 😂 Sister turned on brother, husband turned on wife, boys against girls and then everyone all for themselves! Carnage, with Jax taking the win and some of us, I’m not naming names (Martin & Al) having to hold back their temper tantrums.

We then moved on to safer ground with the bean bag toss to bring us back together again. Luckily both teams won a round each, otherwise there could have been a problem.