Category: Blog

Pushin’ Coins With Grogue

August 14, 2026

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!

Barad-Dûr

July 30, 2026

In Lord Of The Rings, Barad-dûr is the tower fortress of Sauron. Taller than any structure built by man, it stands in Mordor near Mount Doom and at its peak The Eye Of Sauron endlessly scans Middle Earth looking for The One Ring. It’s the domain of ultimate evil, and it was time for me to build my own:

This is another monstrous set, and since Rivendell is my favourite LEGO build of all time I wanted this one as soon as it released. And bought it I did, although that was two years ago and it has sat on a shelf all this time waiting!

The 5400+ pieces came in exactly 40 bags which I’ve needed to pile two deep to fit them all in the above photo.

The tower is built in three parts with separate instruction books. In total; there are 1003 steps across the collective 620 pages of instructions!

Disappointingly, the set also came with a sticker sheet. No one likes LEGO stickers, and for a $460 set their inclusion is ridiculous. Most of these were placed on curved pieces, and apparently LEGO doesn’t yet have the technology to directly print onto curves.

The first instruction book is the base of the tower and uses about half of the bags of pieces. There’s a lot of detail here both inside and out, with doors that open via a hidden switch, a secret compartment where Gollum hides, and various items to furnish the interior for its wicked inhabitants. The angled walls are achieved using clever building techniques and are strongly reinforced, which is a good thing considering the size of the finished tower.

Most of the included minifigures are in the first few bags, and they’re all great. Frodo has a couple of faces, but I’ll always display the one where he’s almost seduced by The Ring.

A group of orcs with a range of armour and weapons inhabit the lower level of the tower. According to the instructions much of these figures – and their gear – is unique to this set. Yes that one in the middle is grilling a sausage!

Sauron and The Mouth Of Sauron are both suitably creepy. While I’m not showing them here, believe me both are even more disturbing without their helmets on! Until rereleased in a recent set, Sauron was one of the more expensive minifigures available, selling for up to $100 on the secondary market. He has a thrown room in the middle of the tower which has a Palantir hidden being a moving throne:

Here’s the finished set:

It took me over thirty hours to build, which I did in sessions of two or three bags at a time. The last book went very slowly since I could only use one hand (I’ve recently had hand surgery) and needed to be extremely careful since I was dealing with the spire.

The Eye lights up via a light brick, and can also be moved to look in any direction:

Here’s the view from behind showing the interior detail:

I enjoyed building this so much I hardly wanted it to end. Now I need to work out where to put it, a non-trivial problem since it’s 83 cm tall! I’ve got an idea or two, but for now it remains on our dining table since it’s remarkably heavy and I’m certainly not going to move it with only one hand!

Ten Things We Didn’t Buy From The Antique Warehouse (And A Few Things We Did)

July 7, 2026

On the way back home from Rochester this past weekend we stopped at what claims to be the biggest antique warehouse in the state. With over 1000 vendors I’m inclined to believe them, and even though we only had a ‘quick focused look’ through the vast complex we still were there over two hours.

Here’s ten items we didn’t buy:

I’d never heard of this intriguing nearly 50-year-old boardgame and I’ll admit I was tempted. But I found a few reviews online that say it has poorly written rules and gameplay is boring so I left it in the case. Had it been less expensive I probably would have got it for the art alone.

$60 for a 37-year-old yo-yo? There’s surely a Freddy Kreuger fan out there for which this item is a grail, but for me it’s just something fun to see.

This is a resin frieze of John and Robert Kennedy created in 1968 by an artist named Joseph Zutz. These were originally sold unpainted – a dull grey colour – but this one has obviously been coloured. There were a lot of JFK items in the warehouse; I knew he was a popular president but I thought idolatry of politicians was a recent phenomenon.

This reminds me a lot of a similar Darth Maul bust I own, the exception of course being that this Ferengi (from Star Trek) is absolutely hideous. I probably should have bought this one and flipped it to Bernard for a tidy profit.

A 56-year-old Mountain Dew bottle?!? This is my favourite drink, and of all the things I’m showing here this is the only one I regret not buying. If you look closely at this photo you can also see a vast selection of View-Master slides on the next shelf down.

This would be a cool find for the deep-pocketed Battlestar Galactica fan that has everything. There wouldn’t be too many copies of this over 40-year-old game still existing, and of those I imagine a minuscule amount have unpunched game pieces. Like many of these formulaic licensed games from the 1980s, I bet the gameplay is dull.

I don’t have much to say about this one, except that I love it still exists in such good condition, and that the basic design of it reminds me of a lunchbox I owned around the same time (1977). What was mine? I no longer remember…

From the same year we have this doll. In remarkable condition considering it’s a half-century old and virtually encourages you to destroy the box to free the ‘photo on back’! This item reminded me of a John Travolta postcard book I purchased – also at an antique shop – about a decade ago and have yet to use.

Bernard’s a big fan of both Elvis and M&M’s but I didn’t buy him these because he probably already has them in his collection. Possibly that was a poor choice since if he didn’t I could have flipped them to him for a king’s ransom.

These taxidermy dioramas are called ‘whimsies’. A whole case was full of these, with the animals all posed anthropomorphically or interacting with props. The toad is creepy with his fake eyes, but a stingray (!) was even creepier!

So if we left all these fine things in cases (and this is just a portion of the interesting items we spotted) then what did we buy? Here’s the list:

I pulled these comics from dollar boxes where almost every comic seemed to be a different series. I told the cashier there were 25 but she counted 23 so I got them for only $0.92 each. I’ll read all these and then pass them on to students.

This is about fifty postcards, most of which I’ll use for Postcrossing. They averaged about $0.50 each which is a good price for unused vintage cards, and I’ll never grow tired of buying such things. The pile includes ten identical copies of the same card, which I will send to Sue long after she’s forgotten about this blog post 🙂

Printed glasses from the 1980s are somewhat common in antique shops these days, but there was a remarkable abundance of them at this particular warehouse. This was the only video game related one I saw, and it’s a glass with an intriguing origin. From what I can determine, this was made by Bally in 1982 for sale in stores. However they also made very slightly different versions for game arcades, cinemas and even for the burger chain Arby’s. It seems this was a very common glass in its day!

And lastly how could I resist this set of kid’s party supplies from 1978? Obviously inspired by Star Wars, these paper plates, cups and napkins are unused, still sealed and even have original price tags ($0.25 and $0.50) on them.

Antique stores continue to get better and better as we age and the stuff from our youth is now ‘antique’. I’ve already located another big warehouse about an hours drive away that I’ll probably check out later this summer!

Robot Claw