It’s Saturday morning. It’s raining. We have no morning plans, and my son’s soccer game is in the afternoon. The kids have been up since six and are already climbing the furniture. As I exit the bedroom after “sleeping-in”, my wife is waiting and gives me a look that implies, “now this is your circus.” Thankfully, as a seasoned dad of two young boys, I have a go-to plan for rainy Saturday mornings just like this where I need to get the kids out of the house for a few hours: Fun City Pizza.
Fun City Pizza is located in Springdale just off of Exit 72/Sunset Ave. It’s a versatile place that combines an arcade (pay for tokens), indoor mini-golf course (18 holes for $4), and a complex network of tubes and slides (free). They also have several “city” themed rooms for hosting birthday parties. Today, we should have the place more or less to ourselves. Arriving right as the doors open at 10 am, it’s just me and another savvy dad executing the same plan with his two young children. It’ll be that way for the next hour or so before business picks up and the first wave of birthday parties starts to roll in.
Having gotten a great deal on tokens back on Black Friday, the boys and I breeze past the main counter and enter the arcade. My strategy is to buy tokens in bulk and stockpile them ahead of time, rationing them out over several trips, saving cost and allowing us to skip any lines. Immediately past the entrance gate, my seven-year-old’s hand sticks out and I give him 6 tokens. I then proceed to take my two-year-old to the toddler area where he breaks free of my hand and sprints to the “Bob the Builder” dump truck ride. I pop a coin in Bob’s dump truck and my youngest grabs the steering wheel pretending to build imaginary buildings with a big smile on his face.
I then take a moment to survey the arcade until I get a visual on my oldest who is on a mission to get as many tickets as he can. I like that the floorplan of Fun City Pizza is very open. I can stand in the toddler area with my two-year-old and more or less have a clear line-of-sight to where my older son is at any given time. Nonetheless, I also know that six tokens aren’t going to last overly long, and he’ll naturally have to come and check back in with me at fairly regular intervals. It’s a good system. In fact, I see he’s already coming back towards us with a fistful of tickets. I take the tickets, I give him another six tokens, and we repeat the process.
Eventually, the little guy has his fill riding in the dump truck and moves on to explore the rest of the toddler zone. He climbs into the large plastic “castle” play gym and has fun spinning the steering wheel and going down the short slide. After a few circuits through the castle and back down the slide, he moves on to the carousel. My older son is back again, and joins in on the carousel ride -- which I like since it’s giving me a 2-for-1 on the coin I just put in. While riding, he informs me he needs eight tokens this time because he is going to win an Xbox from a game where you try to cut the string holding up expensive electronics. He immediately regrets this admission because it results in a “Dad Lecture” from me about risk/reward ratios and the importance of getting a good “return on investment” from his tokens. He seems to understand (or pretends to understand in order to move on), takes his six tokens, and runs back to the arcade.
By this point, my two year old has started in on the large network of tubes, slides and netting mazes that make up the play-place (free). Now, on one hand, I love that FCP has this giant apparatus. It’s perfect for getting energy out. Great for rainy and cold days. What I do not like about it, is that I’m too big for it. If my two-year-old gets lost in there (and he inevitably does), I can’t quite fit my fabulous 6’0” “dad bod” frame in there to fish him out. Usually, I have to rely on my older son to go in there and rescue him when that happens. Thankfully, the little finds a slide and exits successfully on his own.
Next, we find my seven-year-old playing a game called “the Dog Pounder.” You grab a lever that looks like a dog bone and try to bounce as many balls as possible into the paw of a giant bulldog. He informs me that you get more tickets for a higher score, and he consistently gets a max score, resulting in a healthy return of tickets per play. Overall, I think FCP strikes a good balance of rewarding you with tickets for your token on most games. Pleased that my previous lecture on “return on investment” has found practical application with “the Dog Pounder,” we watch him play a few more rounds before I announce it’s time to go.
As we head to the prize counter, we come to my favorite arcade “game” at Fun City Pizza. It’s a kiosk that automatically counts the tickets and provides you with a receipt. It’s a huge time saver. All that work at “the Dog Pounder” appears to have paid off as my son has accumulated some 200+ tickets this morning. We walk away with some assorted candies and little plastic starships as his trophies for the day. We arrive back home in time for my two-year-old’s naptime, and my seven-year-old seems pretty absorbed in an intergalactic battle between the starships.
This promises we’ll have a fairly quiet rest of the day until the soccer game, and once again, Dad is a hero.
In conclusion, there are a lot of ways to have fun at Fun City Pizza for kids of all ages. I find our trips there to be a good value in that my boys get a mix of physical activities in addition to the typical arcade game fare. Check their website funcitypizza.com and click on “Specials” for pizza and token deals. Fun City’s games offer a great variety of play-schemes leading to a low-cost one-to-two hour excursion with the kids. This is especially important on rainy days where NWA’s options are limited as far as indoor options, that can entertain a wide variety of ages under the supervision of just one adult. Fun City Pizza has become a favorite of ours, so, Dads, the next time you sleep in on a rainy Saturday, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you over by “the Dog Pounder” at Fun City Pizza in Springdale.
