I went to Dave & Busters for the first time in years. Even if I was snooping to see if there were new cards in the Star Trek coin pusher I wouldn’t admit it. The place was dead and I was surprised by the number of gigantic gun and shooting cabinets based on licensed properties:

As I staggered toward the latrine I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw this:

Holy smokes, a Mandalorian & Grogu coin pusher?!?!? What madness led to this? The film was a failure and probably shouldn’t have even been made but someone thought they’d turn it into a coin pusher?

A quick scan of the playfield revealed cards featuring all our forgettable favourite characters from the film. I had to play this immediately!

I instantly forgot about my need to urinate and near-ran over to the counter to get a gamecard. The pretty attendant seemed relieved she had a customer and I barely reacted when she cheerily told me the minimum cost to get a play card was $28! I quickly handed her cash and hurried back to Grogu.

Using this professionally annotated image, let me describe the ‘gameplay’. A (pink) ring of targets continuously rotates and every time you push a button a coin rolls down the (yellow) ramp. If the coin hits a target extra coins roll down the (green) ramp onto the playfield. Some targets give you other rewards, including the ability to launch a ball – pinball style – up a (blue) ramp.

You get tickets for every coin that falls into the hopper, when you shoot the ball, and if you redeem any cards at the shop. I was barely interested in the tickets, I just wanted to win all nine cards. My target was the large clump of cards right at the edge, as shown in the first pic.

My $28 got me 150 coins, which feels like a crime but is actually less than a quarter per coin. I’m one of the best medal game players in the world, so I knew with 150 attempts I’d be walking away with a pocketful of cards. I wasted no time and began my quest!

At first I was dropping coins with wild abandon as I gained the measure of the machine. About 30 coins in I fell into a comfortable rhythm of dropping coins at periodic intervals so they always hit a target and often got me a ball to shoot. Coins were dropping like rain, but the massive clump of cards was proving stubborn. This continued for about 20 minutes, with only one or two cards dropping and the pile at the edge growing over-larger.

Then – with only a dozen or so coins remaining – I won a jackpot spin from a ball shot and (as you see above) my prize was ‘party mode’. This gave me free coin drops for ten seconds. I released all my limiters and smashed the coin drop button like Takahashi Meijin! I must have dropped over 100 coins in those ten seconds and I giggled like a simpleton as the playfield overflowed with coins which led to the massive bounty of cards all falling over the edge at once.

These are the sort of moments that make you feel truly alive.

And then I was done. 150 coins – all $28 – had been given to the machine. I reached into the hopper and pulled out 13 cards, including the 8 outlined in red above, and 5 doubles. Notably, I didn’t get the ‘Mandalorian’ card, which means were I going to redeem them all for points I was one card short of 3000 tickets.

The 9th card was tempting me near the edge, but as an renowned medal game master I knew not to throw good money after bad, and returned to the store counter to see how many tickets I had won.

After turning in my 5 card doubles (for 50 bonus tickets each) my total was 1072 tickets! This was much more than I expected, and I had no doubt I’d be able to get a fine prize or two from the shop.

Alas I was only 179,000 tickets short for a Switch 2 so I browsed the other options and eventually chose these (total cost: 1065 tickets):

At only $28 for a small bag of Swedish fish and some sort of liquid spray candy I felt like I should have got a free slap in the face as well…

Here’s a better look at my winnings. The cards are plastic, have nothing except a logo on the back, and have already been placed into a box never to see the light of the sun ever again. I’ll forget them as quickly as I forgot the film, but the joy of winning them will be with me for ever!