A while back, we heard rumblings and saw distant, blurry shots of a Jumanji videmption arcade game that was on test at a Dave & Busters location. We never got a good look at it but the project eventually dropped the Jumanji license while the game itself continued on and today we have more information on what that is – Spins Ahoy!
Having been tested at locations like Dave & Busters, Chuck E. Cheeses and Gameworks for some time now, photos have begun to pop-up of this new title. Through the grapevine I’ve been hearing that it has been doing extremely well on test, often drawing in the maximum supported players of four and outearning other top games at the locations.
Upon hearing those good impressions and finally receiving some more photos of it, I reached out to the developers to find out more and they gave me a brief description of how it works. For starters, Spins Ahoy! is developed by Team Play Inc. Readers might recall that this isn’t the first pirate themed game that the company has created, previously launching Pirate’s Booty; more recently they have released titles like Family Guy Bowling, Launch Code, Fishbowl Frenzy and the FunStop Photobooths.
For Spins Ahoy!, it still features a pirates on a treasure hunt on a tropical island theme but it has been adapted in it’s own way from that older title. One big difference is the presence of four specially designed knob/spinner controllers instead of one. It is setup like a board game and players can join or stop the action at anytime. There are four characters, each assigned to a particular station on the control panel. By the sounds of it, they kept some of the basic elements that Jumanji would have presented but have given the game their own twist. The names as labelled on the control panel are: Jon LaFeet, Cap’N Ken, Red Raven, & Salty Pete.
The base gameplay sounds straightforward – after a player coins up, they spin the spinner which causes their animated character to move around the game board. Wherever a player stops, that’s the amount of points/tickets they win. The game apparently has humor and the characters have different reactions depending upon where they land but without seeing this in person, it’s hard to say how that plays out.
Two of the corners of the board have a floating key on them. If a player lands there, they are presented with 5 treasure chests to choose from. As you might expect when it comes to such chests, each one has a different hidden value inside while the other two corners just have large bonus values. There are also collectible letters which seems to indicate some sort of bonus mode being in place but no details were provided on that for now.
We also aren’t sure if it has a non-redemption/amusement mode or not – details to be mentioned at a later time I suppose. There is also no release date for this yet, other than it is likely to launch this year. With that, I imagine I’ll see it at IAAPA 2018. As a note with all location test games, things can change on either the hardware or software without notice.
What do you think about Spins Ahoy! based on what we know so far? Anyone out there played it yet?
