Kids Empire San Antonio Park North

About

Parents here have worked out something the chain does not advertise: on a school holiday when you still have to be at a desk, this is an office with a ball pit attached. The wi-fi is good, there is enough seating to open a laptop, and a single entry lasts until closing. The catch is arithmetic — those seats exist in the morning and have stopped existing by mid-afternoon on a Saturday, when the room runs at more than twice its weekday level.

The structure is a tall multi-level maze of slides, crawl passages and ball pits with a dance floor in the middle, and there is a separate zone of mini slides and soft blocks for ones to threes. Feeding people is the weak point. The counter runs to chips, ice cream and drinks and nothing else, so families walk out into the surrounding shopping center for a proper lunch and come back in on the same entry.

Everyone is in socks past the entrance, adults included, and the desk does not make exceptions; two reviewers are still annoyed about it. Birthdays are a reserved table beside the play floor rather than a room of your own, which sounds worse than it is: party guests get the same full-day access as everybody else, so the celebration runs a couple of hours and the visit lasts as long as you like.