Nickel Mania — Attraction in Carrollton

I've been taking my daughter here since she was an infant (she's 8 now) and we've always had a lot of fun at this place; they have great games and awesome prizes that don't cost too many tickets.

However, I've been thoroughly disappointed in some recent changes they decided to make that have frankly stripped away all the joy of going to a nickel arcade.

First of all, sometime within the last few months they switched from using nickels to using the boring CARD that you get at any other "modern" arcade. So you have a nickel arcade called Nickel Mania, that now does NOT use nickels anymore!

This is frustrating and disappointing in more ways than one. You don't even get actual tickets from the machines anymore! They all get loaded on to the card after your game. You barely know how much you've won, and worst of all it strips away the joy of hitting a jackpot and seeing 1000 tickets slowly come out of the machine, and the excitement of being able to count them all at the end.

The most insidious offender of all though is the fact that they replaced every machine with this card reader that still costs 6-10 nickels for some reason, and when a game is broken, it STILL CHARGES YOU THE FULL AMOUNT OF NICKELS! So a game that costs 8 nickels takes off $0.40 off your card and you don't even get to play the game. Before you'd put 1 or 2 nickels in a machine before realizing it was broken so no harm no foul.

Honestly, you can still have a good time once or twice, but after these small changes, I have to say this arcade is NO LONGER FUN! Which is the point of an arcade is it not?

I really hope they go back to the way they were running this place before so we can go back to having fun instead of leaving...

Do not waste your money! You will be charged an "admission" fee just for walking in the building. Even if you are using a previously purchased card with money still on it. There was a lot going on when we first checked in. There were 2 camps there and the lady working the front desk was in pajama pants and barely spoke to us. I didn't think to ask if this extra charge was recurring. Unlike other places such as pin stack or chuck e cheese where you pay extra for the physical card but aren't charged again to use the remaining money on your already purchased card. On top of that this place has definitely gone down hill. The stools around the games are just disgusting and the entire place smells. I don't know if there was a change in management but we would not have returned if I hadn't put so much money on the cards the first time. I spoke with the assistant manager to see if he could help me understand how charging someone just to walk in the door to use something they already purchased made sense, and of course he couldn't. I would love for the manager to respond to this post. I was told he only works 3 days a week so I wont...

Three stars because we actually like the place, just really dislike Kristin (Kristen?). She is a miserable person who clearly lacks customer service skills. I never leave reviews but her service was so atrocious that it left me feeling very compelled to write this. We got there at 10:15pm with three excited boys and she refused us service not once but TWICE! When we first walked in, there was no welcome to nickelmania. It was, "oh we close in 30 min". I said no problem, we are.aware. then we proceeded to get our credit card out and she said, cno i told you we were closing in 30 min, i will be unable to process credit cards, we can only take cash." Ok...no big deal, we had cash. Whoooop! As we were telling her how many nickels we needed, she told us they are closed for the night. We werr there for a total of 10 min and we went from not taking credit cards, to.only taking cash, then refusing our money, to kicking us out. Olga, i know you wouldnt be happy with this kind of service. Kristin is a horrible employee. I'd fire her if i were here boss. Kristin, if you are reading this, YOU HAVE...