Hello, Our Carnival is on March 1st I am pre-selling wristbands for $6.00 and on the day of the event for $7.00. I'm also selling tickets, for those who don't want to purchase a wristband. We used wristbands last year it worked pretty well. The only limitation with the wristband is that they can't play twice in a row, they are welcome to go to another came and come back. Also for prizes we figure that each game should have enough prizes to give away 1 prize every minute.

To me it sounds like alot of trouble! Sorry! We are having our's next month and every booth will require 2-4 tickets. There will be 2 ticket table's set up and you have to have a ticket to play the booths. Booth's will not except $ to try and cut down on who handle's the $! We thought about the bracelets but couldn't seem to come up with a working system that wasn't more work!! (I'm sure your already tired!) Good luck and please let us know what you decide and if it was more/less work for you!

Well, we have a mixture of types of games. The ones (duck pond, etc) for little kids, they give 1 redemption ticket for every time you play (not many big kids at this game (we could probably set it at 2nd grade and under if we had a problem). Then some games (plinko, can toss, hockey shoot, b-ball free throw, etc) you have to actually "win" in order to get a redemption ticket. Also there are "no prize" games/events, for example this year we have a "Dino Daze" theme and are having a bone exhibit set up in 1 room that would require a ticket to see. Plus we have a MoonWalk, cake walk, cotton candy. So some things take a ticket but you don't get any "redemtion" ones back.

With 20 games/events I think I would need to make the bracelets worth more than just 5 or 10 games. I think right now we set 2 tickets for most games, which is $.50. I realy like the idea of letting kids do "unlimited", I think the kids would be thrilled to know they could do anything as much as they want. I was thinking more about limited the number of redemption tickets they could get instead of the number of games they could play.

I was thinking possibly to have tickets for those who didn't want to buy the bracelet and offer bracelts for $15 dollars. Do you think that would be too much?

[img]smile.gif[/img] Lauren (dd wanted to add something! LOL)

I like the idea. I really like that a 'new' parent came up with it! Way to get them involved!

I need a small clarification: Does every game give a prize ticket to every player? I would think that the easiest way to make it work is to have games for older kids where they might actually not win... You could also require that parents accompany their children. That would cut down on the time that kids would be playing. Maybe limit how many times a kid can visit a booth (this would be for older kids I think).

If it were me, I think I'd offer a $5 band, a $10 band and a $20 Family Band instead of just one band and tickets. I'd use a fancy hole punch (a different shape/design for each booth maybe?). The $5 band would buy 5 games, the $10 band would buy 10 games and the Family Band (attached to Mom or Dad only...lol) would buy 24 games (family of 4= 6 games each, but the kids could use them all as long as Mom or Dad was wearing the band). Once you have all your holes punched, your gaming time is up... You could pre-sell the bands for $4, $8 and $15 and still make a killing, while at the same time encouraging FAMILY participation.

Good Luck!

We had a new parent at our last PTO meeting who brought up the idea of using bracelets (like you get at a county fair to ride rides all day for 1 price) instead of tickets for the carnival. Our carnival is in March and it is of course too late for us to be spending time making such a big change but I told him that I would look into it for next year.

Here is how our carnival is currently run. Game tickets are purchased (some at a discount rate presald and also more at the night of the event), when a child meets the requirements to "win" the game, they are giving a "redemption ticket". They then turn in the redemption tickets for various prizes.

Parent's have expressed difficulty for smaller kids to keep track of which tickets are for games and which are redemption. Also parent's don't like waiting in line for more tickets to play more games.

Our concern with doing "unlimited games" is that we would also be giving unlimited prizes. Since our fundraising company is donating all our prizes this year and next, I guess now is the time to try this (since money for prizes is not coming out of our pocket).

I was just wondering if anyone had tried this and approximately what was the charge for the "unlimited games" bracelet.

This year we have our carnival set up so that a child could play all the games once(about 20 games) and get a bag of cotton candy for around $10 dollars.

I think it would be a TON less hassel for us and the parents to offer the "unlimited bracelets" for a flat rate of $10. I guess we would still have to offer tickets for those that didn't want to spend that much.

The carnival is only for a set time and really how many redemption tickets could kids get in # hours, especially if lots of kids had the "unlimited" and there were longer lines at the games.

Hum, any thoughts?