Broken Clock Brewing: the monthly three-strike that draws 50 players to 14 machines

Here is a number that does not look right until you know the venue: the average field at Broken Clock Brewing Cooperative is 39.9 players. That is the highest of any room in the record, higher than LITT at 30.9 and more than double Northstar at 15.2.

Broken Clock has fourteen machines.

Forty players. Fourteen games. Once a month, on a Saturday afternoon, in a brewery taproom on Marshall Street Northeast. It works because the format never changes and because everybody in the metro knows the date.

One event, thirty-seven times

Thirty-six of the 37 tournaments here have been group knockouts. Three strikes, occasionally progressive, run by Aileen Beno-Lietz, who has directed every one since the first in September 2023. Twenty-nine of them started at 2pm on a Saturday.

There is no weekly here, no league, no seasonal series. One monthly, and a couple of bigger versions of the same thing when the Minnesota Super Series comes through. Across those 37 events the site has 1,477 entries and 2,453 completed games from 207 different players.

The big ones:

Sixty-five players on fourteen machines is a long afternoon and the strike counts get raised to match. The July 2026 event drew 39 and went to Zac Juelich; May had 44 and Garrett Wright won it. The quieter August 2026 edition had 25.

The fourteen

The lineup is operated by Anderson Amusement and it turns over faster than you would expect from a taproom bank. Right now it is Pokémon and Transformers from 2026, King Kong and Star Wars: Fall of the Empire from 2025, JAWS and Metallica Remastered from 2024, a Spooky Halloween CE, and then a back row that has barely moved in years: Austin Powers, Red & Ted's Road Show, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Indiana Jones, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Terminator 2 and a 1984 Space Shuttle.

Tournament usage tracks that split almost exactly:

Eight Ball Deluxe, Spin Out and Buck Rogers have all rotated out since their heavy years, which is a good reminder that the machine list on the venue page is the current floor and the games table underneath it is the history. Both matter. One tells you what you will play this month; the other tells you what the room has been.

Austin Powers deserves a note. A 2001 Stern that nobody puts on a best-of list has taken 199 tournament games here and has knocked out more people than any other machine in the building. If you draw it with two strikes, you have a problem.

Who wins

Nobody owns this venue, and that is a direct consequence of the format and the schedule. Twelve events a year with fifty-strong fields and three strikes apiece does not reward a home-field regular the way a weekly league does.

Marcis, IFPA 323rd, has won half the events he has entered here. Nahorniak, ranked 15th in the world, is four from nine. Those two turn up when the Super Series leg is on the line and they tend to leave with it.

The attendance board belongs to people who have not missed a month: Darryl Anderson, Chad Lietz and Aileen Beno-Lietz herself are all on 36 of 37. Rob Koppelman and Lindsey Koppelman have 30 each, Jack Copeland 29, Peter Kovach 27, Naomi Lund 25.

Darryl Anderson has played 36 tournaments here and won one, which is a perfectly respectable ratio in fields this size and a good argument for showing up anyway.

Going for the first time

It is a brewery, not an arcade. Games run a dollar for the new ones and fifty cents for the older ones outside of tournament play, the beer is the reason half the room is there, and the tournament takes over a corner rather than the building.

Since the field is large and the bank is small, machine familiarity beats machine choice here more than anywhere else in the metro. You are going to play Austin Powers. You are going to play Road Show. Read the playbook tabs on both, and look at the Scores tab to see what a competitive game on them actually looks like in this room.

If you want to know who you are up against before strike three, the head-to-head tool gives you the record against any individual, and your profile's All machines tab tells you which of the fourteen you can trust. The arena report puts both together.

The tournament runs monthly on a Saturday afternoon. Check the venue page for the next date, and give yourself an hour on the floor beforehand.

More rooms: 56 Brewing runs a similar monthly strikes night a mile away, and LITT and Northstar are where the same crowd plays the rest of the month.

More from the blog: where to play competitive pinball in Minnesota has the rest of the venues, and following a tournament live covers what the event page does while you are standing there waiting on the next round.

Featured image generated for this post. The machine lineup on the venue page is synced from the Broken Clock listing on Pinball Map; if a game changes, update it there.