It was August 2003, I believe, when our family began a tradition that is somehow still going on to this day. We took the kids to Dave and Busters™ for Food and Fun™ to celebrate the End of Summer™, on the evening before the First Day of School™.

If you’ve never been, Dave and Busters is kind of like Chuck E. Cheese’s, but for humans who are over five years old. If you’ve never been to Chuck E. Cheese’s, then just picture average food combined with overpriced, miniature arcade games — all set to a light and noise show that could rival a Harry Styles concert.

But it’s also fun, if you’re in the right mood and with the right people. And that’s what the family trip was about.

Always eager to try new places and sample new cuisine, we settled into our booth and opened the Book of Food Choices. While patrons are certainly allowed to just eat and leave, or skip the food and head right to the game floor, the Eat and Play™ combo is not a bad choice. For one thing, only a small subset of menu items are offered with this combo, which means the Book of Food Choices becomes much more manageable. For another, you save a few bucks on the game card.

After scanning the menu, we each settled on some variation of Breaded And Fried Thing With a Side of Additional Fried Things™. We wolfed down the food in order to maximize play time.

So what’s play time like? Well, I’m glad you asked. It’s doing the following for two hours: You find a large machine with bright flashing lights emitting loud sound effects and/or music. You swipe your card. You enjoy upwards of thirty intense seconds of play. Then you collect zero or more tickets.

At the end of the night, you take your pile of tickets to the Prize Area and exchange them for goodies. There are many prizes to choose from, such as:

• Gum
• Small plastic item
• Alternate small plastic item
• Small stuffed animal
• Large stuffed animal
• Sony PlayStation

I don’t get the sense there’s a lot of middle ground. Items are either small and useless or coveted and expensive, and only sparsely populated in between.

By the end of that first year, our ticket balance hovered around 1,000 tickets. At this point we could easily buy seven or eight pieces of gum or three small plastic items. The PlayStation was easily a century away at the rate we were going.

---

We returned the next year. And the year after that. And the year after that. The routine was the same: order four plates of Fried Fat, four diet Cokes, and game cards. At the end of the night we’d look around the Prize Area, and more often than not, leave without exchanging any of our tickets for plastic.

By about the fifth year of this, the kids discovered the Coin Pusher Games. You know the ones. You drop in a token. It lands in a pile of tokens. And then nothing happens. Until maybe the fifteenth time you do it, and then enough tokens have piled up that one or two will fall over. And when they do, those are converted to tickets.

But what the kids also discovered, is these games came with a higher coin->ticket payout ratio than any other game. In that one year alone, I believe we doubled our life savings. Our cumulative balance handily rolled over into five figures.

Laura also gained a preference and a talent for the wheel-of-fortune class of games, where you push a button or pull a lever at just the right time to stop a spinning wheel or a flashing light at just the right time for huge payouts: up to 1000 tickets per win.

Me, I would waste my money on flight simulator games which would pay out, on average: nothing.

But our growing balance suddenly made some of the higher ticket items suddenly feel not so out of reach. One caught our eye: a full Wii Fit system for the low, low price of — I want to say — like thirty thousand tickets. And right then and there we made the decision to continue banking our winnings and aim for the stars.

Did we ever get that Wii Fit? Well, you’ll just have to tune in next week for the Exciting Conclusion™.