Degenerate Loser Gambler Question (also happy birthday to me)

[barrn]

Hello everyone, been a while since my last post.

I have a question about medal games in Japan. I'm talking about the games where you go in and exchange money for tokens (similar to a pachinko parlor, except with medals/tokens instead of balls) and then use the tokens to play different gambling-type games (pachinko, video horse racing, slots, etc.).

Friday was my 21st birthday, so me and my friends went out on the town and drunkenly explored the city we live in (yeah yeah, the drinking age is 20 here anyway, but it was more of a symbolic hammering than anything). We came across one of these medal game parlors that had a promotion - 500 medals on your birthday. So, I took them up on the offer and played some of the games.

I sat down at a slot machine and almost immediately won the jackpot, something like 1400 medals. For reference, 2000 yen gets you something like 375 tokens when you first go into the place. I stopped playing and put them all into my deposit box or whatever.

My question is what can I do with them? Do I exchange them for prizes or cash -- similar to pachinko balls -- or are they worthless? I read the Wikipedia article on medal games and it said that the prizes cannot be exchanged for anything. Is this true? If it is, I guess I have to accept it as fact, but it seems awfully odd that so many middle-aged and older people would spend so much time and (presumably) money accumulating these medals and playing these games only to have them be meaningless outside of the game parlor. Is there something I can do with these coins? It's not a super big deal, but if they're worth something or if there's something I can do with them I'd like to know.

Cheers.

[Mulboyne]

Many happy returns for Friday.

Sadly, you've just won the right to go back and play those games until you run out of medals. It may seem that there isn't much difference between exchanging pachinko winnings for cash and doing the same for medals but the the first passes scrutiny (or, more properly, doesn't get scrutinized) while the second doesn't. I think the law even goes as far as to say you aren't supposed to take the medals away with you, to stop any third party exchanges.

It sounds like you won them in a mainstream place so there's even less chance of turning them into beer money. I did stumble upon a place in Kabukicho once where I hit a medal jackpot and was promptly handed 10,000 yen but I learned afterwards it was an illegal casino.

Some ordinary joints used to have bonus medals which would pop up in your winnings from time to time. You could collect them to win prizes but they had no significant monetary value and were more like gifts from the owner to regular customers.

[barrn]

I figured as much.

I wonder why so many people bother then, though? Why gamble for tokens when you can just go to a pachinko parlor and gamble for real money? Meh.

[Samurai_Jerk]

I figured as much.

I wonder why so many people bother then, though? Why gamble for tokens when you can just go to a pachinko parlor and gamble for real money? Meh.

Why do people play Monopoly or video games? It's the same thing.