After two months of casual gaming during 1/2 price Wednesdays at Dave and Buster’s almost every week, Michelle and I finally accumulated enough tickets to walk out with an Xbox Kinect game bundle. It cost us 35,000 tickets, and we have almost 2,000 left over.

So what did this Kinect really cost us? It’s tough to calculate it exactly, as Dave and Buster’s converts dollars into virtual “coins” on game cards which are used to play their games. And the cost of each game varies greatly. In the roughly 8 weeks of playing, we have spent approximately $242.37 on games there. This not only includes ticket-dispensing games but also plenty of regular video games. But we also have roughly $7.43 worth of tickets after redeeming the 35,000, so to earn the Kinect, we really spent around $235.

A Kinect on Amazon costs $130, making it seem like we overpaid by $100. But that’s not true, as we played lots of regular video games, likely $100 worth. And we also had fun in the process of winning tickets. It works out that we each spent around $15 every time we visited D&B for somewhere around 16 total hours of fun. That’s just over $1 per hour to play many, many games – plus we walked away with a new Xbox Kinect, something we likely wouldn’t have bought on our own.

I remember going to video arcades years ago where $1 would last me at most 5 minutes, playing coin-hungry games. If $1 can buy me around an hour of gaming entertainment at Dave and Buster’s, it’s a fantastic deal. So it’s really impossible to put a price tag on the tickets that we used to get the Kinect, as the fun time far outweighed the actual money spent.