Carnival Games at Lakeside

Carnival Games at Lakeside

(This was adapted from a free-flowing FaceBook response)

I worked the games from 1978-1982. The first year, I was an all-purpose worker, which means I was banished a lot to Color Dot, Machine Gun, and Dime Pitch (damn merry-go-round music still sears my brain); places where workers learned the art of boredom. I graduated to The Weight Game that year and on to The Birthday Game. Eventually, I was elevated to stock room and finally to games supervisor before I was canned (still makes me angry).

I only recall one game being "rigged”:Dime/Quarter pitch. At that game a fine silicone mist was sprayed onto the plates to cause the coins to skid across and off the plate. When the giant animals (expensive) were given away, you know that someone screwed up.

Some games were made almost impossibly hard: basketball shooting (small rim), Basket Game (23 degree angle to the wicker basket using hard plastic light softballs--I got the angle wrong when I built it with Dave Wade), Machine Gun: had to shoot out every thread of the red star from the target. Cat Rack, a part of the Front Games, was trickier to win than you might think. The "cats" were fluffy and allowed to ball to pass through without striking anything of substance.

Other games were relatively easy to win, but the prizes reflected that. Birthday Game was quite straight forward. We knew that you had only 14 places to drop your quarter, so our losses were essentially predetermined when the "rhomba-casa-quaddecahedron" was rolled. Later, Don (the boss boss) added two more dates to the board for a total of 16 squares and a new hexakaidecagon. The Weight Game only gave away "slum" and "flock", prizes worth pennies. Once you got someone to play, we won.

There are a few tips I learned along the way to consistently win at some of the games. Most of the tips center on one over-riding principle: less is more. To win at almost any throwing game, making a slow, under-powered toss is the key. On Cat Rack, I could knock down three clowns almost every time I tossed by using a gentle dart throwing motion. Simply aim the "dart" (ball) and toss like a dart. I used the same strategy at Break-A-Plate with great success. Todd Stafford mentioned the bank shot in Skeeball. One of my favorite strategies worked on Machine Gun. Most people who played, took the gun and blasted away all 100 shots in rapid-fire fashion. The way to win, however, was to take single shots. Since the sights weren't standardized, the first couple of shots gave you an idea where the shots would go. Then you simply cut a circle around the red star using single shots, causing it to drop out of the target completely in one piece.