During the summer while our kids are out of school my wife and I alternate taking a day off each week to take the girls out and do something a little different. Otherwise they seem to be drawn into their rooms with iPads in tow only showing their faces when they need something to eat or have to recharge their electronic gadgets. Recently it was one of my weeks and I thought it would be fun to head over and enjoy an afternoon at our local Dave & Buster’s Arcade.

Located in Orlando just off of the notorious International Drive, Dave & Buster’s is basically a huge arcade. I think of it as a Chuck-e-Cheese just for older kids and adults. They can be found all over the United States. Some have bowling alleys included, while others are just the arcade games.

They can be a bit noisy with all the games, and especially the guests playing the games. Unlike arcades from when I was young there is no need to bring rolls of quarters, everything now is done by a digital card. There are kiosks along the wall where you can activate a new card and load it up with certain dollar amounts.

Each game has a scanner on it that will display the “cost” to play that particular game, then you just swipe your card and that amount is deducted from your balance. Whenever it gets low you can just reload it with more funds to continue your fun.

They also do have a restaurant with standard items you would find at any other chain sports bar. There are plenty of large screen TVs around showing all the different sporting events going on that day.

We certainly made the rounds of all different games during our visit, but one my kids became quickly obsessed with was this coin pusher style game. There were a few other versions where the coins were preloaded in the machine and after swiping our game card a set number of the coins would be dropped into the play area hoping to then push the stacks of coins in the winning area giving us lots of credits we could later use in the shop. However this one version I have shown above was Nascar themed, but must have been an older version. As we swiped our card to play, the machine actually dispensed a handful of physical tokens for us to then insert ourselves.

While my kids kept playing I grabbed one of the tokens and saw it had a Dave & Buster’s logo on it and opted to keep one for my personal token collection.

When we got home I was curious about the size and did a quick comparison with a United States Quarter, and the token had a slightly larger diameter.

The same logo is on both sides of the token, and I would have really loved it if they had included the location on these somewhere. My guess is these will be the same at any Dave & Buster’s location at least until they update that machine and do away with the physical coins.

Keep on Collecting!