You’ve seen them around. A cabinet full of plush toys, and a single mechanical claw dangling inside controlled by a joystick or a pair of buttons. You already know that UFO catchers are a rip-off, a bygone product of the 80s and 90s, designed to ensnare the proud and the inebriated. “Why are these things still in existence?” you might be wondering. “Surely people must realise that these things never actually pay off, right?”
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Oh, but they do, gentle reader. They do.
I never would have believed it myself were it not for my time here. University students, salary men, senior high school girls – I’ve seen all of them manoeuvre those claws with micrometer precision, as if they were docking a space station in low orbit. They used those pitifully weak claws to ever so patiently edge those prizes into the chute…and they succeed consistently, paying no more than a few hundred Yen per prize.
UFO catchers prey on the softest, most malleable part of our psyche – our hubris. It all looks so simple, and we are suckered into the idea of an easy win. Maybe you’ve been burned by them once before, tricked into thinking that you can get yourself (or your hot date) a big ol’ plushie.
However, succeeding at UFO catchers requires thinking outside the standard idea of how claws are meant to function. The key reason behind this is that the actual grip force of the claws in UFO catchers is incredibly weak. The claws can’t lift the prizes into the air, because:
Despite these factors, prizes are far from impossible to get. All you need to do is use the tools available to your advantage.
Due to the popularity of UFO catchers, there are several different game types that go beyond the standard “claw pickup”.
I’ll talk about the different kinds you may encounter in Japan or your local arcade, and some strategies on how to succeed.
1) The Pincher
As the name suggests, this UFO consists of two arms that close in a pincer movement. The range of the arms opening is usually equal to the width of the UFO’s body. I also find that the tips of the claws stop at the same width as the bend of the closed arms.
The UFO will keep its arms open until it fully descends, then it will close its arms and then rise to its original height while repositioning itself over the chute. As is to be expected, the strength of the arms is far too weak to pick up prizes. There is also often no grip (in the form of rubber or something similar) on the ends of the claws, and they’re flat-tipped, which means there is less surface area to actually make a grip on something.
This is okay, though – the idea is that you utilise a combination of the prize’s weight and physical characteristics to move it closer to the chute. Round objects can be rolled, and cardboard objects can be dragged on smooth plastic. This differs from prize to prize, but the general idea is that you’re not aiming for a one-shot win – you’re looking to move the prize into the chute over several attempts. ￥400 for an exclusive alarm clock is still a pretty good deal, no?
Some games have a heap of smaller prizes, such as mobile phone accessories. In this case, it makes more sense to shift a mass of prizes so that gravity and inertia send them into the chute, rather than attempting to individually pick up a single prize.
2) The Single Finger
This is just like a standard Pincher, but with a claw removed. It operates in exactly the same way as one with two claws. One way this game operates is by adhering plastic rings to prizes, and requiring the player to move the prizes using a single claw and the rings.
Of course, the grip force of the claw is weak, so other tactics such as shuffling, dragging and pushing down are key here.
The single finger is also used in a number of other game configurations, which are described in detail below.
3) The Suspended Prize
Large, high value prizes are bound in rubber bands and hung from a plastic ring. The base of the plastic ring is then balanced on a ball of rubber at the end of a white rod. Prizes are kept in place by the friction caused by the rubber attachment. You are given a single finger to work with.
Naturally, the single claw does not have the necessary strength to lift the prize off the rod. These games usually require a combination of see-sawing the plastic off the rubber attachment (which is a precise and potentially expensive process), or using the downward force of the claw to pivot the plastic in a certain direction. Alternatively, you can press the claw onto the rod itself, then allow the claw to snap back into the plastic, knocking it off the rubber attachment:
Continue on to Part 2
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David Hsu
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18 min read
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Nov 10, 2023
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I’ve always been interested in playing the Japanese crane games whenever I visited Japan. There’s something about the challenge in getting figurines without spending too much and figuring out how the games worked. Recently this year, I came back from Japan and was interested in online crane game sites since I learned about them through Youtube videos and was curious about how they worked. A month of research, spending some money on two sites, and several months later, I now have too many prizes and a lot of information on how they work after studying them for months.
This is my in-depth review of crane games and what they are.
Japanese crane games are arcade games where you usually control a claw at the top and attempt to get a prize below, generally plushies or figurines (sometimes food). They’re similar to carnival games where you pay for an attempt to win a prize, but the prizes are much better. They come in two varieties: luck based and skill based.
Luck based crane games are ones where you will win a prize after enough attempts. It doesn’t matter if you manage to grab the prize with every attempt, it will always release it until it reaches a payout rate (a certain amount of tries) where it will fully grab the prize and drop it in the winning bin. These are the only types of crane games in the US and, in my opinion, contain horrible generic prizes for the amount you would spend to win. The Japanese ones are slightly better with name brand plushies like Pokemon, Sanrio characters, or video game characters.
Skill based crane games, on the other hand, require knowing how the game works and lining up the crane to push/pull the prizes rather than grabbing them. The classic one is a box on two metal bars and the objective is to shift the box around so it’ll fall down. They come in many varieties where the goal is to drop the box into the reward pit so you can collect it. In addition, these crane games usually have a “pity” system (to borrow from gacha games), meaning if you try enough times and still can’t get the prize, an attendant will move the prize for you to a much easier to win position and you can continue until you get it (which usually takes only one or two more tries to win).
If you enjoy carnival games and like the challenge of winning prizes, it’s a fun way to pass the time and potentially get something cool from it as well. If you are especially skilled, it’s possible to win prizes in only a few tries and get prizes that would normally cost much more to buy.
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In addition, when playing outside of Japan, you can win prizes and receive them much earlier than official resellers. For example, a prize may appear in April and be available in crane games, but if you were to buy it instead of playing the game, it will ship 2–4 months later due to how the crane game prizes work. You also have to compete against other people who may be pre-ordering and may find a situation where it’s sold out.
I believe in general, prize figures (the name used for figures that are only available in crane games) will release first in crane games and doesn’t get released for resellers until after a period of time. More recently, online sites have begun selling prize figures directly, so this is a newer trend for figures that used to only exist in crane games or second hand resellers. If you’re in Japan though, you’ll always get immediate access to the newest figures and prizes, but anyone outside of Japan will either have to play online crane games or wait a few months for resellers to stock them if you are able to order them.
Prize figures are also time sensitive. Once the prizes are out of the crane games and unavailable through official resellers due to selling out, you won’t be able to obtain them other than through auction sites or other second hand stores, or if the company that made the figure has a renewal version (essentially a reprint). For some prizes, there are no resellers (for example, a sushi plush that I won is not available online anywhere) so crane games are a way to win exclusive prizes that you can’t find anywhere else.
So here’s the tricky part with online crane games: it varies. In Japan, crane games are generally set to 100¥ (or roughly $0.70) per try, and many have 6 tries for 500¥, so at most, it will cost you on average 2000¥ (roughly $13) before you win a prize assuming you have assistance. Sometimes, there’s some crane games with a 500¥ per try for more premium items, but those are rarer and in general 100¥ is the standard.
Online, the rates are much higher. From looking at a lot of sites, the trend is $2 per try and assuming a 20 pity limit, it will cost you on average $40–50 if you can’t get the prize without assistance. The rates are higher due to import costs and fees, plus additional maintenance wherever they’re hosting the crane games (generally in a building somewhere in Osaka or Kyoto area) and shipping fees.
Oh yeah, did I mention shipping fees? Shipping from Japan has gotten a lot more expensive due to Covid and many shipping lines shutting down, so expenses have increased and delivery times have also increased due to less shipping routes. Some sites offer free shipping with some limits, some have flat shipping rates for each item, some charge based on the weight of the items. You’ll have to pay attention to how each site handles it before you decide to spend money to play.
The price of $40 to win compared to $13 may seem steep, but if you look online at the resellers, each of these prize figures you can win will cost $25–50 each to buy, and that doesn’t factor in shipping which can increase the cost even more. Unless you live in Japan or are currently in Japan on a trip, the prizes will always be much more expensive. My rule of thumb for playing online crane games is if you really want a figure, are willing to try your luck at it, and don’t want to wait 3 months before you can buy it from an official store, give it a try and who knows, maybe you’ll win it in much less. Just make sure the game you’re playing has a pity limit to help out and don’t spend more than you can afford.
Now for the meat of the topic: how do these online sites work? It generally works like this:
There are a few things to keep an eye out on each site.
Point systems and whether they expire
All online sites use a point based system where you buy points with a set amount of money to be able to play, and each site has a different point system and amount needed to play. The other tricky thing is many sites will have the points expire after a certain amount of time, so you’ll have to use it within the time frame and whatever is unused will be lost. The system is similar to microtransactions in mobile games where you will never be able to completely use up the premium currency and there will be some lost points.
Bonus points and free plays
Some sites offer additional benefits for buying points, but for the most part, I ignore this because the benefits are usually minimal and not enough to win anything (and they also expire very fast). Some places will allow a free try a day, which I think is the best deal, while others give free points for checking the site every day, but the points are usually a small fraction of the points needed to try a game and they expire within a short time frame.
In addition to daily logins, a few sites also offer mobile deals (an offer wall) where you play mobile games and get points. If you’re willing to spend time playing mobile games, it’s possible to get more than enough points to get a prize at these sites. However, that’s another can of worms and I could write about it as well for another article.
Prize Retention
When you win a prize, your prize is held for a limited amount of time, which differs based on the site you use. Some may hold it for 2 weeks, another may be a month. Check the site and make sure you’re not losing your prize if you wait to long.
Shipping
As mentioned earlier, each site has different shipping rates and how they handle it. Check their policy to see how much extra you need to pay to ship the items.
Now that you understand how Japanese crane games work, here are some of the sites I’ve researched and/or tried.
This is the most non-Japanese focused site I’ve seen and perhaps the fairest that I’ve tried. They have a mobile app and the website, though if you plan on buying currency, use the website as the mobile app has an additional surcharge they add to offset mobile fees. If you buy at least $10 worth of currency, you will get free play tickets every day that expire after 24 hours. Note that it’s 24 hours, not end of day, so it’s possible to stack two free play tickets to use every other day if you so wish. The majority of the games cost 120 points, which is roughly $2, though they have added cheaper machines for gacha prizes. Free shipping every week if you won a prize with money, and 600 points ($10) to ship if you won only using the free ticket. I don’t believe points expire, though I wouldn’t let them sit idle too long anyhow. Shipping takes about 3 weeks to get to the US. The downside for this site is the selection is smaller compared to others, so the prizes change often.
I’ve used this site the most and have won the most prizes here, so this is my favorite site to check out from time to time. I will say that they have an uncanny ability to take the most unflattering photos of the prizes to show, but they look better in person once you get it and the photos have improved since I started. The claw strengths are generally fair so the skill based games don’t feel like you’re getting cheated. After about 20 tries on the skill based machines, if you still haven’t won, there’s an assistance button that will pop up in the corner that you can use and someone will rearrange the prize to make it much easier for you.
However, keep an eye on the turn timer as it’s still counting down and you don’t want to lose your place (which I’ve seen happen to other people and had their prize stolen). Do note that if you press play again too fast and skip the assistance button, it won’t show up again until after another 20 tries, so be careful about that. The way the assistance works is wonky for their implementation and I think they could improve that so someone calling assistance can’t lose their prize or if you accidentally missed it, you can at least call again after.
In any case, besides small nitpicks, I can recommend this site.
This site is Japanese oriented as buying currency costs yen and isn’t converted for other types. They do have a search bar so you can pinpoint if they stock the prize you’re looking for, which is a nice feature, but with a recent trend of not having any text or description for the items, it may or may not help. Their selection is decently big, with not just figures and plushes, but food and electronics as well. The point conversion when buying is not the best, but they have holiday deals that offer much better deals if you plan on buying points to play. The points are roughly 1:1 to yen, though you get slightly more from the monthly deals, so 100 points is about 100 yen. The points to play the game vary between 100 to 250 points per try, with occasional premium items costing 500+ points. Shipping costs a flat 1000 points per item and also arrives in about 3 weeks.
If you purchase points, you’ll get daily login bonus points that are 50 points/day, though these free points seem to fluctuate between 50–100. However, they expire after a week, so realistically, you can get maybe 2–3 free tries a week. Purchased points expire after some time of inactivity (maybe 3 weeks?), but I’m not sure what the exact timing is as my points have disappeared now and the online FAQ doesn’t mention about purchased points expiring. You may also get free play tickets when you first sign up, but in general, the machines that accept tickets are very few and the prizes aren’t good. Also to note is that many of the prizes share the same machine, so you’ll occasionally see multiple prizes under maintenance due to that.
The games each have a help meter that builds up as you play. If you still haven’t won and the bar is full, it changes to a request help button and clicking it will call for an attendant to help and locks the game for you so no one else can try during this time until you get the prize or are inactive for too long. Note that the bar is deceptive as it will fill up fast in the beginning but slows down toward the end. From what I’ve noticed, the pity limit is different depending on the price of the machine, with cheaper machines requiring more tries compared to more expensive machines.
I’ve won a few prizes here and I think it’s not too bad, even with the 1000 points/item shipping fee due to the current yen to USD conversion rate and the lenient assistance.
Perhaps one of the largest online crane game sites out there. This site is only in Japanese so you’ll need Google translate if you can’t read Japanese. There’s a large variety of prizes and they do have a search bar, though it’s not the best if you don’t know Japanese as English doesn’t always return results. Point conversion is roughly 1,200 tp to $1, and most games take 2000 tp to play ($1.66). There’s a large variety of different game types to play with a mix of skill and luck based machines. Some games are marked with assistance available as not all games will have a pity limit. I haven’t won any prizes from this site, but according to their FAQ, they have free shipping every week if you paid for currency, and otherwise 5000 tp (about $4) to ship.
Now for the downsides. As far as I can tell from my few attempts with the free tickets and points I sometimes got, the games are either heavily luck based or the skill based machines are deceptively difficult to play, with some bordering on impossible depending how the boxes are setup from other people’s attempts. Many of the claws are calibrated in such a way that it will barely reach the box and not have the strength to move them well, and many games have a setup that looks easy enough to do, but is actually much more difficult to win, so you would need some knowledge and a lot of time scanning through the games to find something that’s winnable.
With the site being mostly in Japanese and the difficulty of the games, I don’t think this is the best site to use. I’ve read stories of people winning a lot here, but I believe it’s going to require a lot of time compared to other sites to hunt for games you can win or constantly reaching the pity limit for games that offer assistance.
This site has a hybrid English and Japanese support, so all people are welcome. It has a very large selection of prizes you can win, though it doesn’t have a search bar and requires manually loading more machines when you reach the bottom of the list. I guess it’s more like a traditional crane game center where you have to browse the games to find something you like, but I feel like having a search bar would be useful here. The login procedure is a bit sketchy in my opinion, but once you create one, you get access to everything include free daily points and xp (they have a level system), though the points you get are miniscule. I’ve noticed that they stock older prizes here along with the new releases, so if you missed a release of a prize and the other crane games no longer have them, you may find it here.
The point conversion is about 0.8:1 yen and each attempt is 200 points, so each try is roughly 250 yen (about $1.80). It seems like there’s a special deal for first time customers where you get double the amount of points, though I haven’t bought any here. Free delivery is available if you spend 5000+ yen, though the catch, according to their FAQ, is it’s only by sea, which can take 3–4 months to deliver. If you want air shipping, it costs 4950 points (about $43.50) to ship to the US. Points also expire in 6 months regardless of if you paid for it or got it through free rewards, so if you do buy currency here, you need to use it or lose it.
I haven’t tried winning any prizes here, but the games don’t seem too bad to play from my tests in the free play area. However, the hefty overseas shipping fee and the point costs and expiration makes me hesitant to try this compared to the other sites. The upside are the people who work there seem very enthusiastic based on the win replays I’ve seen. Whenever someone wins, I see an energetic thumbs up or even hand puppets congratulating you.
What used to be the Taito is now owned by Gigo. This is the online version of it, but with the caveat that it’s only for people living in Japan. As far as I can tell, they do ship overseas, but the selection becomes much smaller compared to if you live in the area. The selection may look large when you first visit, but once you create an account with a non-Japanese address, the available machines will shrink dramatically.
I didn’t do too much research into this once I saw that I had a very limited selection and the prize I was looking at before was not available.
I’ll give some tips for playing a few types of crane games and how to win them in your attempts.
These games are won by player skill and a little bit of luck. Remember that in all these games, the goal is to shift the box until it falls, not necessarily to pick it up. Because of this, the general tip is to position the claw off center so when it retracts, it’ll pull or push the box in a direction that will hopefully get it to fall.
Bridge
This is the classic skill based crane game that you’ll find everywhere in Japan and in the online crane games. The basic premise is you have a box or a plush in the middle of two bars and the objective is to make the box fall into the pit below. Recently, they’ve added non-stick plastic around the metal bars to make it harder to win, but the concept is still the same. There’s also other variations where the bars are diagonal or slanted in different directions.
A tip for this is all the claws will twist clockwise as it drops down, so you need to factor that into where to stop the claw when moving it as it will usually turn to around 15–30 degrees off at the bottom. Some may not twist, but slide forward or some other direction, so use your first attempt to figure out how the claw behaves. Because it’s actually grabbing at an angle and the claws are generally not at full strength, how you approach each game will be different depending on how the box moves and how it’s angled, as well as which side of the claw has more force. There’s a lot of videos online of people showing how to win prizes on these, so I would recommend watching some of them to get an idea of how to win.
Box Slide
I’m not sure what the actual name for this type of game is, but the objective is to slide the item that’s on a slanted surface into the pit. Usually it’s a box, but sometimes they have softer items like a towel. There’s a small trick they do for boxes where there’s weights taped to the back to make it more back heavy so it stays on the surface. Due to that, the boxes generally need to be much further out than you think before you can tip it over.
For techniques, the ideal case would be to move the claw to where it will line up right against the left or right edge, then when it picks up, it’ll shift the box/towel to one side. Then you would wiggle it back and forth until it fell. However, you can’t to that because the claw strength is not 100% and one side is usually weaker than the other (plus similar to the bridge, it rotates), so the way you do it is still similar to the ideal case, but you don’t go as extreme. You line the claw slightly off center so both claws can hold it on the bottom and gradually shift it side to side until it’s far enough that you can push on the box to make it tip over. From experience, the claws are generally not strong enough for only one side to move it if both sides don’t catch it. You’ll have to do a few test tries to see how the claw behaves and figure out the strategy from that.
There’s really no strategy for these types of games, just pure luck. There’s different varieties, but knowing that it’s luck based will let you know how to approach them.
3-Prong Claws
A classic crane game found all over the US that contain random plushes. The way these games work is there’s a hidden payout percent that they’re set to and after a certain amount of tries, the claw will have a full grip and you’ll win the prize. Online, the way to increase your odds of winning is to know how many people played and how long it’s been since the last win. There’s some third party sites that keep track of this, but if you don’t have access to that, you can check the last winning time that most sites have. After that, it’s just hoping for the best. The claws can win anywhere from 1–50+ tries, so hope luck is on your side.
Takoyaki
This one involves using a modified claw and grabbing ping pong balls from a bin somewhere, then letting the claw go over the takoyaki pan (or a similar interface) where it’ll drop the ball(s). One of the circles will be marked with red or some other color to designate the winning slot and if a ping pong ball stays in there, you win. Due to the bouncy nature of ping pong balls, this is very random. However, for many of these, the more you attempt it, the easier it’ll become because the balls will keep piling up and slowly funneling toward the winning slot. In some cases, they do offer assistance for this type of game, so perhaps one of the better luck based ones to try if you’re willing to keep spending/trying to hit that assistance limit.
I’ve won quite a bit from online crane games and have have a nice collection of figures now, so I think it’s a fun way to win some prizes from Japan. If you do try it, remember to have fun and don’t spend more than you can afford.
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