Theme & Amusement Parks in Maricopa

At Stratum Lasertag, light warriors leap and duck while toting phasers in an arena with 15 different levels and 90 towers, bridges, and ramps. Designed by the EME Entertainment group, who designed Universal Studios Japan, the emporium bathes warriors in the flickering of strobe lights and the neon glow of black lights as they ascend ramps and blast at one another from different angles. Throughout the space, murals of black holes, outer space, and alien creatures set the mood for bouts of intergalactic warfare. In between laser bouts, players can refuel at the concession area or keep trigger fingers nimble with a stint in the arcade room. Stratum Lasertag outfits participants with laser-tag vests and phasers during birthday parties, bar and bat mitzvahs, graduation celebrations, and team-building events for actual builders.

Leave your friends in the dust with today's Groupon: $29 gets you three go-kart races at Speedway Raceway. With this deal, you get Speedway's Arrive & Race (three laps of practice and a 13-lap race) package times three. Bring two friends along for a speedway showdown, or keep this deal all to yourself and get loopy doing 40-plus turns around the track. With that much practice, you'll be fit enough to try out for the National Hot Rod Association.

The myriad classes, activities, and programs at Great Play operate with one focus in mind: to spark kids’ passion for physical activity. At Great Play’s core lies an interactive arena, which Arizona Foothills magazine awarded Best Kid's Entertainment Indoors and Best Birthday Party Spot for Kids, designed to facilitate physical fun. Projector screens spotlight the arena's walls while sensors and a directional sound system inject interactivity into the slew of noncompetitive games and activities that help boost kids' motor and athletic skills. Monitoring the arena's playing field and adhering to the SCORE training method is an upbeat staff that teaches youngsters how to swing a baseball bat, bribe slam-dunk-competition judges, and trap a soccer ball by breaking each skill into a series of positively reinforced smaller steps. The staff also tailors birthday parties to birthday kids’ likings and hosts Parents Night Out events that allow caregivers to drop off their children and hit the town while kids play in the gym, feast on pizza, and catch a G-rated flick on a 100-square-foot screen.

At Sea Life Arizona Aquarium, you can watch Ziva, a rescued green sea turtle, graciously share the limelight with the 5,000 other oceanic creatures that populate the aquarium's tanks, including white-tip reef sharks and cownose stingrays. Rays swarm in live feeding shows, sea stars wait in tanks to be touched, and crabs don't mind of you hold them in your hand or whisper sweet nothings in their ears.

GameWorks fosters friendly competition between kids and adults by surrounding pizza, draft beer, and half-pound burgers with a mosaic of interactive pursuits. Each location holds more than 200 arcade-style games, which include racing and shooting challenges from Sega as well as lower-tech classics such as pinball and skee-ball. Other games shower high scorers with tickets that can be exchanged for prizes or collected to make a fun mummy disguise.

JumpStreet is an indoor trampoline park where taut floors and angled walls made of springy trampoline surfaces beckon children and adults to bounce back and forth or try aerodynamic flips and gravity-defying leaps. The arena is structured like a skateboard park, though bouncers don’t need any equipment to hop across the wall-to-wall planes or climb up, slide down, or spring off the tilted trampoline walls, which can also be used to recreate the summer Olympics’ popular trampoline belly-flop event. Guests can hop on over to the springy dodgeball courts, where safe, competitive play is enhanced with ample bouncing, and arcades and batting cages offer engaging activities for those who need to rest their feet. Scattered across JumpStreet’s various locations are an assortment of other safe, kinetic activities, including a bull ride, a multicolored maze, and a foam pit.