Coin Push Games

Odds are, some of my readers only want to see posts about board games and others are more interested in the phone app games.  I rarely get out to actual arcades, but when I do, those games are just as much a part of game history as any of the others.  So I sometimes include those. 

Here is an odd little niche game that's not really a game at all: the coin push arcade games.

These are huge on YouTube.  You can find thousands of videos of people filming every minute of the "action".  There are fun moments but the rest is like watching paint dry.  It's not a game where you get to make choices other than when to hit the button.  All of the arcade games these days are essentially just pasttimes that convert the credit on a game card into "tickets" on the card, but I like the meta-game of finding the games where I get the most minutes of entertainment for those credits.

There are a lot of different types of coin push games.  The one shown here is themed with Angry Birds (why not), and the top/vertical section is essentially a pachinko machine, which is another type of game where you can find thousands of obsessive YouTube videos.  We couldn't figure out what any of the numbers and lights behind the pachinko board were supposed to do, or why there was a ping-pong ball in little round tray off to the middle left. We just wanted to focus on pushing the coins.

It's easy to see why the game is popular.  It's addictive.  You walk by and see a bunch of coins or tokens hanging off the edge and think you can push those into the bin easily enough.  But the pachinko part is a perfect scrambler of your plans.  You want to get a token down the right side to push those hanging coins, but the pins bounce it around and it will probably end up somewhere else.  In this particular game, if you get the coin through one of the 3 lit-up spaces with angry birds, the game dumps several bonus coins as well, which can be a huge boost.  

As if the pins didn't add enough randomness, the timing is a huge factor.  Your coin needs to land behind other coins on the tray that slides back and forth, to push coins off the top stage down onto the bottom stage, where the same sliding tray pushes them forward again.  If your coin flops down on top of other coins, it does not add to the push at all.  After some observation, you can get better with the timing, but thinking this is a skill-based game is an illusion.

I have gone all the way back to the end of 2022 and made sure my posts all have proper labels.  So if you just want to see dice games, click Labels and then choose whichever label you want.

Back to coin push games.  You get 10 coins, so there's a fair amount of play time.  What's funny is that after the first game we played, I instinctively reached down to collect those coins that we saw fall into the bins, but no, you don't get coins anymore, and winning actual coins would make this a gambling game.  We're playing for tickets here, so that makes it harmless, right?

One interesting note: the game next to the one we were playing had a big stack of coins on the bottom stage, a circle of 8 coins stacked about 12 high.  When we came back later to use up our last few credits, the stack was gone.  I should have gotten a photo of it.  How did it get in there?  Someone would have to open the machine and spend a lot of time stacking those before the arcade opened for the day.

Oh jeez.  I didn't notice this until I looked at the photo, but the left and right bins are labeled "MISS".  Only the center bin counts?  Haha, we sent so many coins down the wrong chute.  A big part of the fun of games is trying to figure out exactly what the rules and patterns are.  

Overall, these are fun to stare at for a while, and like every other game-like activity, we like the challenge, and the feeling that we can maybe work out a strategy, but I see how they could become an obsession and cost a lot of money.  See those YouTubers ... here is a video pointing out some channels devoted to coin push challenges where the presenters have gone from excess to being outright scams.