Happy Claw arcade, located in the Hawkeye Shopping Center at the corner of Hawkeye Avenue and Golden State Boulevard, wants you to claw a prize, and wants you to walk away happy.

It’s that simple.

“We want everybody to have a good time and win something,” said Leon Cheang, who co-owns Happy Claw with wife Jen Chia.

The machines at Happy Claw work like any other claw game, which are notoriously tricky and difficult to conquer.

A three-pronged claw is maneuvered with a joystick. The player has 20 seconds to position the claw in — hopefully — in just the right location. The claw is then dropped, and the player waits with baited breath to see if it can grip the desired prize well enough so that it doesn’t fall back into the pile on its way to the retrieval hatch.

“Our games are factory setting,” said Chia. “They’re not set to be hard at all. We want you to win and we want you to upgrade.”

Almost all of Happy Claw’s 25 machines feature stuffed plushie toys inside, ranging from Marvel characters to Pokémon to Hello Kitty to Mario and Luigi. Two of their claw machines feature snacks.

Win enough plushies and you can trade them for the one of the oversized plushies behind the store’s counter, or for other prizes such as book bags, pens and keychains.

There are also Gashapon machines, which are like a high-tech version of a gumball machine: put a token in and get a random prize.

Cheang and Chia, who both were born in Cambodia but grew up in Philadelphia after immigrating to the U.S., wanted to start a business that would bring them closer to their three boys: 12-year-old Aaron, 8-year-old Noah, and 6-year-old Evan.

“We pick the boys up from school and then we bring them here,” said Chia, who said the family resided in Las Vegas for a while, but kept returning to Turlock during vacations to visit Cheang’s family. “They sit in the back and they do their homework, and then they either help us, or play the machines.”

And, make no mistake, the boys are experts and retrieving prizes with the claw.

“They show us how to do it,” said Chia.

Happy Claw is open Monday through Thursday from 1 to 8 p.m., and on Friday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Happy Claw is also available for private parties, with a spacious party room, complete with anime murals on the walls.

“We try to do parties before we open for regular business,” said Chia. “You get the whole place to yourself. You bring your own food and drinks, and set up in the back room, and then you get tokens to play the games.”

Happy Claw, which has been open since September, is located at 8634 W. Hawkeye Ave. The phone number is 209-678-9244.