(978) 368-8321
Creativity: 3
Atmosphere: 7
A big thanks goes out to Jim Buck, owner of Buck’s Furniture and Island Adventure Mini Golf for emailing us and letting us know about this new course, which opened in February 2003. The course is located in the basement of an old furniture factory, above which is the current furniture store. Although this may not sound attractive at first, we assure you that they did a great job of renovating the place and the course and its surroundings were in excellent condition. Everything received a new paint job and the whole course had a tropical theme to it, complete with plants, tiki torches, grass “skirts” around the bottom edges of the holes and interesting stuffed animals in the plants (i.e., monkeys, snakes, tropical birds). You can even wear a plastic lei while you play if you were so inclined.
As for game play, the course holds its own. The holes become progressively harder, but there is little variation in the basic theme of the holes and they are similar to many other courses due to they were produced by a familiar miniature golf company. The course did have a couple interesting holes, such as number 12 which is incredibly long and on the difficult side, along with one that follows closely after which involves both a loop-de-loop and a “Y” split in the hole. Overall the course isn’t terribly difficult if one excludes the fact that you can easily lose 2-3 strokes from the ball going out of play (see below). As it was newly opened when we played it, everything was in great condition and thanks to it being indoors it will probably stay this way for some time. The downside to being inside is that the course is a little tight in some areas, causing one to feel a little trapped when waiting for the next hole, especially if there’s a lot of people. This course also has the highest stroke limit we’ve ever seen, allowing you to get a whopping 10 on a hole, which one of us had the luck to receive.
One last note is that when we played there were a few areas where the wood siding was too low and we watched as a few people shot their ball over it, especially in areas that were in back of ramped-up section of the course. When we played the course a second time a couple months later, we did notice that in some sections there was some increased wall size, but six of the seven of us (Megan the New Jersey fan did not, and I apologize for saying she did) who played all hit the ball out of course at least once, most of us multiple times. The ease of which the ball can go out, even on the most controlled putt, makes the course a bit of a downer at times and caused us to lower the atmosphere score slightly. On one last note, if you hit the ball into the hole in the middle of the bull’s-eye on the 18th hole, you get a little trophy. It’s a good course overall for an indoor course and definitely worth swinging by a couple of times during the winter or a rainy summer day when looking for something to do.
Reviewed by Pat, Mandy and Putt
Reviewed in 2003