Nakoko — Local services in San Mateo

tl;dr: We had a ton of fun and won 5 medium plushies and a keychain with 30 tokens ($25 with the soft opening promo). Highly recommend this claw machine arcade!

Nakoko currently has a soft opening promo where you can get 30 tokens for $25. (Each try is 1 token.) When I bought my tokens, they gave me a giant plastic bag to hold my winnings, which I thought was optimistic because I rarely win anything with claw machines.

It turned out that giant bag was exactly what we needed. We won our first plushie (a turtle) after only 2 tokens. We then won our second plushie (a cat) after another 2 tokens. I was stunned and elated at our good luck. We did encounter a challenge trying to get a campfire plushie - after trying ~8 times, we gave up on that one. But we had good luck with a few other machines (winning a lemon tea, Snorlax, and another turtle) By the time we spent our last token, our bag was filled to the brim with prizes: 5 medium ones and a keychain!

We ended up trading in 3 of the medium plushies for points, which can be used to trade-up for more expensive prizes (mostly plushies, but also mugs and other things). You can save the points for later and don't have to use them on the same visit.

The arcade was clean, and the service was friendly.

Thanks for a great...

Amazing new claw arcade in the Bay Area! Like other claw machine places, you can either keep your winnings or trade up for a larger prize. We went during their soft opening and were impressed by the selection of plushies to upgrade to. Lots of Pokemon plush to upgrade to for Pokemon fans. We ended up trading for a massive size Kirby plushie that could barely fit through the door of our car 😝. Friendly staff as well. Will be going back to play more next time we’re...

Lots of fun. Easy to win pluffies. You can trade them in for bigger size ones before you leave. Or you can get a card for credit the next time you come back so that you can keep getting larger and larger items. If you take the items with you, you can't bring them...