Jay Gee’s Ice Cream AND FUN CENTER - METHUEN, MA
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Score: 79.5/100
Would we play this course again? Yes.
Should you play this course? Yes.
The Takeaway: Jay Gee’s Ice Cream and Fun Center delivers the fun promised in their name with this safari-like animal-themed mini golf course. This well-maintained 18-hole course serves up a terrific blend of challenging mini golf and excellent props and is a course we’ll happily play again. There are a few faults on some holes, but nothing that isn’t overshadowed by, say, a large volcano that emits a plume of mist in the background while you try to close-out the hole with a 3-foot putt. This course handily beats out the nearby Merrimack Valley Pavilion Fun Center and Cedarland Family Fun Center.
Jay Gee’s Ice Cream and Fun Center
TECHNICAL REVIEW
Jay Gee’s Ice Cream and Fun Center in Methuen includes a mini golf course, batting cages, a go-kart track, bumper boats, an indoor arcade game area, and if that’s not enough it also serves up ice cream. The complex is somewhat tucked behind a car service station and you can miss it if you’re casually driving by; the western parking lot area in front of the building with the large blue Fun Center sign is closest to the mini golf course. Find the blue shack tucked between the batting cages and bumper boats to pay for your round of golf.
From the entrance sign design, to the parking lot surface, to the arcade building that we walked through to get to the start of the mini golf course one, one thing was immediately clear: this whole complex was squeaky clean and well-maintained (the arcade was quite possibly the cleanest we have ever seen and could likely double in the off-hours as a sterile facility for manufacturing pharmaceuticals). This kind of visible pride in ownership is always a promising sign when showing up to an unknown mini golf course; unsurprisingly the mini golf course condition usually tends to follow suit.
This course has parking lot allure (we’d say it has roadside allure, but as mentioned it’s actually a little tough to see from the roadside) with a volcano, assorted animals you might find on a safari in Africa somewhere like a giraffe, an elevated palm-frond hut, and more beckoning you forth. As is the case at honestly pretty much every single mini golf course we visit, we could hardly contain ourselves as we trotted off to the booth to pay for our round, hell-bent also on not getting stuck behind a family of five that was right on our heels.
Put on your pith helmet and let’s get to the mini golf: A hippo guards the first hole, mouth wide open and challenging you to go for it and try to putt through him instead of taking an easier shot around. Sadly, successfully putting through him doesn’t really net a reward, and you’re better off ignoring him. But still, it’s a nice, classic sort of start and we love first holes that feature putting through an animal (the frog on the first hole at Hago Harrington’s in Stoneham comes to mind).
The first four holes on this course are actually a little underwhelming. Or rather, they’re nicely imagined but lacking in execution. On the second hole, you should, it seems, be able to putt through a hollowed-out log (a hole design we have seen in a half dozen places so far), but the entrance is inexplicably mortared off and you instead have to go around with a bank-shot or, as the scorecard describes for the hole, choose not to putt and instead drop the ball down the vertical limb opening of the tree. Perhaps after construction they decided this hole was too similar (nearly the same, exactly) to the 5th hole and added this odd twist.
The third hole gently introduces a “penalty cup” which should you hit your ball into results in an immediate score of a six. On this hole, the penalty cup is nowhere near where most people would hit it, so we think this is just an easy introduction to the concept, one which we have not yet seen in our play on Massachusetts mini golf courses (the video above shows the 6th hole, which also has penalty cup that is in a more dangerous position).
On the fourth hole, there is a coiled up snake that you can putt up and into. However, the ramp up and into the snake is a bit off, and makes it quite, unintentionally we believe, difficult to putt into the snake. And then once you’re in the snake, you’re reward is to be spit out not very close to the hole. These sorts of high-risk low reward holes are always a bit disappointing, especially when the alternative is a relatively obstacle-free and nearly straight putt at the hole. Still, usually at least one of us will forgo trying to make the conservative play for the low score, and instead try to play the course using the props as they are laid out.
After this initial fun but mildly flawed stretch of golf, things actually settle down into some nicely designed and moderately challenging holes which we’ll get to. But first, let’s talk fundamentals. The turf-style greens are in terrific condition, without tears, ripples, unplanned undulations, or other construction or wear issues. This is a course that thankfully let’s you putt and have some chance of making it provided your aim and break-reading is good. The perimeters are done with brick that is in very nice condition and allows for planning out bankshots.
The cups are uniform, of the tin variety, and generally free from any issues around the lips. Mats for some reason are used on a few holes, but not on most. There are no helper style concave holes to assist players in getting low scores (and speaking of scores, the scorecard is nicely done and some holes feature little pieces of “advice” for each hole in the description…advice in quotation marks because it’s the kind of advice that’s about as effective at decreasing your score as it is getting someone to calm down by telling them to “relax.”
Back to the individual holes, we’ll reign ourselves in and skip giving a detailed accounting of every single hole of the entire course (though we would like to) and instead encourage you to check it out on your own. That said, here are a few brief points of mention on the remaining holes:
The 7th hole presents a nice accuracy challenge and a photo-worthy background, particularly if the volcano is smoking. The 8th too is a fun one with a couple alligators (were it not for the scorecard saying “alligators”, these could be crocodiles to us…we still have no idea what the difference is) guarding (but not aggressively for line-of-putt purposes) the hole.
It’s worth noting here that not every hole on this course has an animal or jungle prop on it. Only about half have some sort of animal or similar to contend with. There are a number of decorative animals just loitering between holes (e.g. a giraffe). The other remaining holes make use of lava-type rock obstacles, or landscape-based undulations, dips, and curves.
The nice part about golf here is that it generally rewards skilled shots, and punishes you when you can’t make a good shot. There are few holes that are the whack-it-and-hope-for-the-best holes. Some holes work your mental analysis skills and have you thinking of angles and breaks, trying to crack the code of the hole and wondering how best to play it. We found ourselves quickly playing most of the holes on this course again after finishing them the first time, trying to work out how best to play the hole. This is always a good sign for us, and tends to happen on the better courses we play. It’s also worth noting we’re not doing this when there are people waiting behind us; on the day we played there were only a handful of people on the course, and we quickly broke away from the family of five playing at a glacial pace behind us.
Continuing on with the back nine, more competitive players will probably appreciate the challenge presented by the go-kart stuck in lava on the 12th hole, and the challenging breaks of the long-ish and prop-free 13th. The 14th too presents a mob (yes, this is the official name according to google) of meerkats guarding the hole on a downhill that if you’re not careful will have you zooming past the hole and relegated to a lower-tier green area at the back. The 17th too is a gorilla of a hole, literally, there is a gorilla on it, and it will require some finesse and placement abilities to secure a two for a score.
The 18th hole is sadly a ski-ball bonus hole, and really, if we ever build a mini golf course of our own we promise that we will have an actual proper 18th hole and not a throwaway ski-ball bonus hole. Interestingly this bonus hole has an automated dispenser right next to it that spits out free round tickets should you get a hole in one here.
All in all, this course offers a fun and challenging round of mini golf that is likely to find some appeal for both younger mini golfers and older skilled players, and we would definitely return here to play a round or two.
APPENDIX
It’s nice to play courses like this one at Jay Gee’s Ice Cream and Fun Center that are designed, constructed, and maintained in a thoughtful and precise fashion. While it’s not without some minor oversights (you could probably call these “quibbles” in some cases), it stands in stark comparison to a number of other courses in the state. From the neat brickwork, to the organized landscaping, to the well-constructed stone footpaths leading from one hole to the next, this a course that just feels good to be playing on.
There is a certain odd feeling that comes with playing courses with torn greens, perimeters with missing bricks or busted-up rocks, barren landscaping, and broken wooden signs. It’s part disappointment, part sadness, part unknown. We’re still mining this unknown feeling and looking to expand on it more, particularly in light of some recent neglected courses we’ve played, but it might be something in line with the feeling you get when you sit down at a busy restaurant and the table is still dirty from the party that just left, and you sort of wait around for the server to come by and hurriedly clean the table with their washcloth while you sort of awkwardly lean back out of their way…”no that’s okay, we don’t mind, no rush” you say. Only in this case, there is no server coming to clean the table, and in fact, they just serve you your food on top of all the existing crumbs and dried spilled ketchup and make no mention of any of it. And this goes on for years. Like I said, we’re still working on mining this exact feeling but this feeling may be close to that of playing run-down courses.
And while some courses succeed in spite of their bad course conditions (Hago Harrington’s comes to mind), it’s a very narrow lane to success this way, and most don’t thread the needle and instead take up their position in the middle to low end of the mini golf course quality bell curve. Fortunately Jay Gee’s doesn’t have to worry about any of this, because this place is in terrific shape and it brings us joy to see and play it. There is probably someone working right now at this late hour as we write this review polishing the hippo on the first hole by the beam of a headlamp, getting ready for patrons tomorrow.