When I was growing up and had an opportunity to go any place where you played games to win tickets that could be redeemed for prizes, I always dreamed of having enough tickets at the end of the day to get one of the prizes on the top shelf. These included basketballs, lava lamps and the largest stuffed animals ever made. I don’t think Chucky Cheese was around when I was little and I never went to one until my children were born and old enough to be interested.
My youngest daughter was invited to a birthday party at Chucky Cheese when she was little. I went to the party with her. She was young enough at the time that I she needed assistance figuring out how to play some of the games. I also helped her keep up with the tickets that she won. At some point during the party, she went to a game that wasn’t functioning correctly. When most games are not working, they take your tokens, you don’t get to play the game and you don’t get any tickets. This one would give you huge numbers of tickets for doing almost nothing. Most games will give you one ticket just for playing. This one was giving you 50. If you did anything that would normally give you ten tickets, this one would give you hundreds. Some of the things that would usually give you the least amount of tickets would cause the game to give you tickets for a solid 2 minutes. We were getting piles of tickets just for putting tokens in the machine. My daughter quickly became bored with this game. It was a game that wasn’t that exciting when it worked correctly. You were trying to shoot stainless steel balls into different baskets that gave varying numbers of points. My daughter wanted to play something else. I basically forced her to stay at this game well beyond her tolerance for staying. She was ready to do anything else. I was had visions of us walking to the car with lava lamps in hand. I did let her spend her last tokens on some other games.
Soon we were making our way to the prize area with our huge ball of tickets. When my daughter started looking at the prizes, she didn’t start looking at the top shelf behind the counter like I expected her to. She knelt down looking in the bottom right-hand corner of the case where they kept the cheap prizes just like she always did. She asked me how many of the tattoos she could get. I told her she could probably get all of them. There were no lava lamps to be had that day anyway. We would go home with more cheap prizes than ever before. And a happy little girl.