Very soon after moving to Chicagoland, we found ourselves a wee bit lost in that we’re not lost but we don’t know exactly where we are sort of way. I think it might have been right after we dropped the u-Haul off and we were headed home. Or headed home via some cicuitous route that would lead us to find some place new and interesting, something to eat and also provide us with excuses to not be at home unpacking boxes in a house we didn’t want to live in.
Whatever. We were driving around and instead of heading toward Cook County, we headed toward Lake County and found ourselves in Northbrook right on the edge of Deerfield. I remember seeing a sign for Nickel City and thinking a) arcade? b) some discount kind of shopping place? c) something else entirely? and not thinking about it again.
Shortly after, in some junk mail circular or junk coupon mailing, we discovered Nickel City was in fact an arcade. Every week there’s some new coupon for Nickel City savings and I’ve mostly ignored it.
Last month I actually visited the website to see if it might be worth checking out rather than ignoring. It seemed to be, worth checking out, I mean.
Arcade games that use nickels and not stupid tokens.
$2 admission fee per person.
Ticket games.
FREE old arcade games.
It sounded too good to be true so I didn’t take any real initiative and plan an adventure. TW, on the otherhand, decided this would be a fun outing for Liz’s birthday. So… we went.
I forgot the coupon at home, which was stupid but whatever it was still cheap. It wasn’t crowded AT ALL. The games did in fact take nickels and there were really free arcade games available. Lots of them. Pac-Man and Miss Pac-Man, even.
The games cost anywhere from one nickel to six. We each had a $5 bag of nickels and a couple dollars of nickels that I grabbed from our change bag. I didn’t use most of mine and gave them to the girls, who both ran out of nickels at just about the same time. TW also ran out of nickels and put another dollar or two into the machine to grab some more (because she couldn’t find me, which was weird but possible in that TW can’t find anyone sort of way.)
We all had a good time, playing games. The girls got more tickets than they’ve ever gotten before from an arcade experience and were pleased with the prizes they cashed them in for.
We spent right at $20 for four of us to spend about two hours playing all the games we could possibly play.
Nickel City = WIN.
When I come to visit we shall all go to Nickel City and play DDR!