A venue signs for a modular course, later loses the lease, and discovers that the word modular never promised what the operator assumed it promised. In this market the same word covers two different products: a portable system built to be taken apart and moved, and a semi-permanent system built to be installed once and refreshed in place. This page is how to tell which one you are looking at, what actually travels when you move, how far reconfiguration can really go, and what the second installation day costs you in permits, power and accessibility.
The question in the title has no single answer, because the word modular does not describe one product. In this market it describes two, and the difference between them decides whether your relocation plan is a weekend of work or a write-off. One family is genuinely portable: built from modules small enough to lift, assembled without tools, and sold on the explicit promise that the course can be moved. The other family is modular in a different sense: built from standardised parts so that holes can be refreshed, rethemed or extended over time, but installed as a semi-permanent or permanent fixture in a specific room.
The clearest statement of the split comes from a builder that makes the second kind and says so without hedging. Asked whether its modular product is portable, the answer is that some brands use modular to mean a portable solution, but that this product is considered a semi-permanent or permanent installation depending on specification. That is a useful sentence, because it names the trap: a buyer reads modular, hears portable, and signs.
The other end of the market states the opposite promise just as plainly. A prefabricated course maker describes its system as a modular design that allows you to move or relocate the course if needed, and names the two situations that make this matter - when the venue is on leased property, or when the course is considered a temporary attraction. Both statements are honest. They are also describing different products.
Assumption. You already own a modular course, or you are about to buy one and relocation or reconfiguration is a live possibility rather than a hypothetical. If the venue is owned outright, on a long lease and unlikely to change, this whole question is theoretical and the semi-permanent family is usually the better buy.
Formula. Before any relocation plan, classify the product with two questions. First, can one person lift a single module, and does assembly require tools? Second, does the maker describe the installation as portable, or as semi-permanent and permanent? The two answers will agree, and they will tell you which family you are in.
Result. The classification decides almost everything downstream. In the portable family, relocation is a planned operation: the modules come apart, the parts list is finite, and the cost is labour and freight. In the semi-permanent family, relocation is a demolition and rebuild: the modules may survive but the installation does not, and the budget has to include everything a first installation includes.
Limitation. The classification tells you what the product was designed for. It does not tell you what a specific move will cost, because no maker in this market publishes a relocation price, a relocation warranty position, or a module reuse life. Those gaps are set out in the last section, and they are the reason a relocation plan needs to be priced by a supplier rather than estimated from this page.
One boundary worth drawing before the detail. If what you are actually doing is adding a hole to an existing venue - one unit, one slot, one installation - that is a different and much simpler problem, and it is covered on the slot-fit guide for adding a single hole to an existing arcade. This page is about the harder case: what happens to the course you already have when the room under it changes.
The portable family is defined by module size and assembly method. A published interchangeable system builds one hole from six parts - four interchangeable fairway segments plus a start and an end - and each module is 1.25 metres or shorter so that it can be lifted by hand. Assembly and reconfiguration need no tools. A nine-hole set in that system ships as fifty-four segments and can be rearranged into more than fifty thousand different hole configurations; the eighteen-hole set ships as one hundred and eight segments and reaches into the millions. The same supplier sells extra custom segments from about two hundred euros each, which is the price signal for how the system grows.
The other portable approach is heavier but still designed to move. A prefabricated course system builds each section from a durable lightweight concrete composite and states that the modular design allows the course to be moved or relocated, with nine-hole courses starting around fifty thousand dollars and a footprint that fits nine holes into about two thousand square feet or eighteen holes into up to twenty thousand square feet. That system is sanctioned by two international miniature golf bodies for tournament play, and the maker reports more than a hundred and fifty courses operating worldwide.
The semi-permanent family starts from a different premise. One established builder describes its modular system as holes engineered from a core timber framework, fully configurable in layout, theme, surface, props, technology and playability, and notes that modular construction leaves room for evolution - holes can be refreshed or rethemed more easily over time, and technology or lighting can be built in later as an upgrade. What it does not claim is portability, and it says so. Its recommended minimum for nine holes is around two thousand square feet, and it has delivered outdoor and marine variants, including a course on a cruise ship deck built with water and salt resistant materials.
Read those three descriptions side by side and the practical difference is not quality. It is what the word evolution means in each case. In the portable family, evolution means the course can become a different course, or move to a different room. In the semi-permanent family, evolution means the course in this room can be updated, rethemed and extended, but it is going to stay in this room.
| Dimension | Portable family | Semi-permanent family |
|---|---|---|
| Can the course be moved? | Yes - it is sold on that promise | Not as a designed use; moving it is a demolition and rebuild |
| Module size | Small enough to lift by hand (published example: 1.25 m or shorter) | Panels and framed sections, typically a two-person lift or a crew |
| Tools needed to reconfigure? | No tools in the published example | Installation by a fit-out team; reconfiguration is a project |
| Materials | Impregnated timber, water-resistant plywood, turf and aluminium trim; or lightweight concrete composite | Timber core framework with configurable surface, props and technology |
| Published entry price | About 8,500 EUR for nine interchangeable holes; about 50,000 USD for a prefabricated nine | Quoted per project; no published list price |
| Minimum footprint for nine holes | About 2,000 sq ft in both published cases | About 2,000 sq ft recommended |
| How it grows | Buy extra segments; recompose the existing set | Add holes in the same system; retheme and refresh in place |
| What "modular" buys you | Portability and reconfiguration | Consistency, refreshability and a faster fit-out than a one-off build |
There is a second axis of difference that matters as much as portability and is easier to miss: what the course is made of, because that decides how many times it can survive being moved. A concrete-composite section is heavy and durable, but every lift and every re-lay is a chance to crack it. A timber and plywood segment is light enough to be carried by one person, which is exactly what makes repeated reconfiguration practical. The material choice is the portability promise, expressed physically.
If you are at the buying stage rather than the owning stage, the same classification applies to the space decision, because a portable course and a semi-permanent course have different tolerances for an awkward room. The space requirements for indoor courses generally are set out on the indoor mini golf space guide, and the short version for this page is that a portable system tolerates a room you might have to leave, while a semi-permanent system should only go into a room you expect to keep.
When a modular course moves, the modules are the easy part. Everything that was installed around them is the part that gets left behind or rebuilt, and the list is longer than most operators expect because a mini golf course is not only a set of playing surfaces. It is a set of playing surfaces plus a route, a set of services and a permission.
The modules themselves travel if they are in the portable family and if they were installed as designed. Surface materials may travel if they were laid as removable sections rather than adhered to a substrate. Edging, capping and trim travel if they were mechanically fixed rather than bonded. Anything that was cut to fit the room does not travel, and that includes the very last piece of trim in every run, which is why a move almost always ends with a small joinery bill that nobody forecast.
The services do not travel. Power feeds, containment, control equipment, sensors, embedded lighting and network cabling are installed to the building, not to the course, and moving the course does not move them. This is the line item that most often turns a modest relocation into a fit-out project, and it is the reason the electrical question belongs at the front of a move plan rather than at the back.
The route does not travel either, and this is the item that connects the move to a legal obligation. Accessibility requirements attach to the course as installed, including the requirement that a proportion of holes be compliant and that the compliant holes run consecutively, with the start of play on an accessible route. Recompose the holes in a new room and you have recomposed that sequence, which means the compliance of the new arrangement has to be established rather than inherited.
The permission does not travel. Permits, electrical sign-off and any fire or occupancy approvals were issued for a specific address, a specific layout and a specific use. A new address means new approvals, and a substantially rearranged layout can mean a re-review even at the same address. Nothing about the equipment being unchanged simplifies this, because the approvals were never about the equipment alone.
| Element | Does it travel? | What it means for the move budget | Who normally carries it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Playing modules and fairway segments | Yes, if portable family and mechanically fixed | Labour, crating and freight; a small damage allowance | Owner, unless the supplier offers a move service |
| Surface laid as removable sections | Sometimes - only if not adhered | New surface for any section that was bonded to a substrate | Owner; check the installation method before assuming |
| Edging, capping and trim | Partly - anything cut to the room does not | A joinery bill for the last piece in every run | Owner |
| Power, containment, controls, sensors | No - installed to the building | A full electrical re-installation at the new address | Owner; this is the largest single line |
| Embedded lighting and network | No | Re-run and re-commission; may need a different control topology | Owner |
| Accessibility route and compliant-hole sequence | No - it is a property of the layout | Re-establish the compliant run and the route in the new room | Owner, as a design obligation |
| Permits, electrical sign-off, occupancy | No - issued per address | New applications, new inspections, new fees | Owner |
| Warranty position after a move | Unclear - not published by any maker we could find | Treat as an open commercial question to settle in writing | Negotiate before the move, not after |
That table is the practical answer to the title question. The holes can almost always be relocated if they belong to the portable family. The course as a working attraction cannot be relocated without rebuilding everything that is not a hole, and the rebuild is the cost that decides whether moving is cheaper than starting again.
The one element on the table that is genuinely unknown is the warranty position, and it deserves a sentence of its own. No maker in this market publishes what happens to a warranty when a course is moved, and the answer is likely to differ between the family that expects moves and the family that does not. Because the question is unanswered in public, it becomes a negotiation rather than a lookup, and the time to have it is before the crates are packed. If the course has an installation acceptance document from its first install, that document is the natural place to record the agreed position, and its structure is set out on the installation handover checklist.
Reconfiguration is the cheaper half of the title question, and for many venues it is the half that matters. Moving a course means a new address. Reconfiguring a course means the same address and a different arrangement, and in the portable family that can be done without tools, without a fit-out team and without closing for more than a day.
The granularity of reconfiguration is set by how the product breaks down, and there are three levels worth distinguishing. The finest level is module interchange within a single hole: swap one fairway segment for another and the same hole plays differently. The middle level is hole-level rearrangement: keep the holes and change their order. The coarsest level is course-level recomposition: rebuild the sequence from the whole parts library, which is where the large published configuration counts come from.
The published example of the finest level is worth holding on to because it makes the arithmetic concrete. In a system where a hole is built from four interchangeable fairway segments plus a start and an end, four swappable parts produce twenty-four distinct variants of one hole. Multiply that across a nine-hole set and the configuration count passes fifty thousand. The number is a marketing figure and should be read as one, but the underlying point is real: a small number of interchangeable parts produces a large number of playable arrangements, which is the entire value proposition of modularity.
Reconfiguration is not unlimited, and the limits are worth stating because they are the same three limits in every venue. The first is electrical: a powered hole can only be placed where power can reach it, so the set of positions a tech-driven hole can occupy is smaller than the set of positions a passive hole can occupy. The second is accessibility: the compliant holes have to remain consecutive and on an accessible route, so a rearrangement that scatters them breaks the arrangement even if every individual hole is unchanged. The third is circulation: rearranging holes changes the walking pattern, and a layout that reads well on a plan can still put two groups on a collision path at a crossing.
The circulation limit is the one that surprises people, because it is invisible in the parts list. Our own guide to the layout errors that cost weekend throughput makes the point that bottlenecks, not difficulty, are what break a busy Saturday, and a reconfiguration is precisely the moment a bottleneck can be introduced into a course that did not have one (the seven layout errors that cost weekend throughput). Before any rearrangement, walk the proposed order as a player and mark every place where two groups would have to pass each other.
There is one more form of reconfiguration that is worth naming separately because it is the cheapest of all: reconfiguring the difficulty rather than the layout. If the holes include interactive or target-based elements, the values and behaviours of those elements can often be re-tuned without moving a single module, which lets a venue respond to its own data - a hole that is too slow, a hole nobody enjoys - without a rearrangement at all. The point of reconfiguration is not to change the course for its own sake, it is to keep the course matched to the players who are actually turning up.
Every relocation ends with an installation, and the second installation is not a repeat of the first. It is a new project with a new room, and the fact that the equipment is used changes nothing about what the room has to satisfy. The three areas that need to be planned as new work rather than inherited work are power, accessibility and approval.
Power first, because it is the largest and the least negotiable. In a powered course, every hole that needs current needs a circuit at its position, and the circuits are a property of the building. At the new address you have to establish what is available at the wall, whether the panel has spare ways, and whether the destination supply matches the nameplate voltage and frequency of the units - which is not guaranteed, because the units were specified for the old room. The ordering discipline that applies here is the same one that applies to any single-hole installation: run power and network before the units go down, not after.
Accessibility second, because it is a design obligation that has to be satisfied by the new layout rather than by the old one. The applicable requirements mean that a proportion of holes must be compliant, that those holes must be arranged consecutively, and that the start of play must sit on an accessible route, with a defined clear floor space at the start of play. A relocation is therefore not only a logistics exercise; it is a fresh layout that has to be checked against the same rules as a new build, and the check should happen while the arrangement is still a drawing.
Approval third, because it is the item most often forgotten until the week before opening. Permits and sign-offs are issued for a place and a layout, and a new place means new approvals. The specific requirements vary by jurisdiction, so the only useful general statement is procedural: treat the move as a new installation for approval purposes and budget the time, because the equipment being familiar to you does not make the approval process faster.
Put those three together and the shape of a relocation plan becomes clear. It looks much more like a first installation than an operator expects, with one difference in its favour: the equipment specification is already settled, so the parts of the project that took the longest to decide the first time - what to buy and how it fits together - are already done. What remains is everything that is about the room.
That is also why the acceptance discipline from the first installation is worth reusing wholesale. A relocation produces a second handover, and it should produce a second acceptance document, with the same categories checked against the new room: geometry, services, accessibility, safety and the condition of the reused modules. The structure for that document is set out on the handover checklist, and the same page is the right place to record the condition of each module on the day it came out of the old room, because that record is what any future warranty conversation will be built on.
The decision at the end of all this is a three-way choice, and it is decided by four numbers: the remaining useful life of what you own, the cost of the move as a share of the cost of new, the cost of re-establishing approval and services at the new address, and whether the new room can physically take the course you already have. When those four are known, the choice is usually obvious. The problem is that one of them is not knowable from public information.
The remaining useful life is the unknown. No maker in this market publishes a module reuse life, a number of moves a course can survive, or a rated cycle count for a playing surface. What makers publish instead is material description and, in one case, an installation still operating more than a decade after it was laid. That is a real data point and it is a sample of one, which means the remaining-life question has to be answered by inspecting your own modules rather than by reading a specification.
The second number, the move as a share of new, has the same problem in a different form. There is no published relocation price from any maker, so the comparison cannot be assembled from catalogues. It has to be quoted, and the quoting exercise is itself informative, because a supplier who will quote a move is a supplier who has done one, and that is a signal about the family your product belongs to.
The third and fourth numbers are more tractable. Approval and services are a scoping exercise against the new address, and the physical question is a drawing question: does the new room take the same hole count at the same spacing, with an accessible route and power in the right places. Both of those can be answered before any commitment, and both should be, because they are the two items that most often turn a viable move into a rebuild.
| Situation | Relocate | Reconfigure | Buy new |
|---|---|---|---|
| Portable family, new room can take the layout | Usually the cheapest path | Not the issue | Wasteful |
| Portable family, new room is smaller or awkward | Possible but check the layout first | The right tool - reduce or reorder rather than move | Only if the set cannot fit at all |
| Semi-permanent family, same room | Not applicable | The intended use: refresh, retheme, extend in place | Not needed |
| Semi-permanent family, new room | Effectively a rebuild; price it as one | Not applicable | Often the honest comparison |
| Leased property with a short remaining term | Portable family: plan the move now | Not the issue | Avoid until the lease is settled |
| Owned property, stable use, long horizon | Not the issue | Retheme and extend in place | Consider only if the course is the constraint |
There is one more input that belongs in this decision and is not on the table because it is not a number: what the course is for. A course that is the main attraction of a venue has to be a good course in every location, and a move that lands a compromised layout in a worse room can cost more in lost revenue than the move saves in capital. A course that is an amenity alongside a bar or a restaurant has a much lower bar to clear, and a cheaper rearrangement is often entirely adequate. Which of those two you are operating is the question that should be answered first.
The equipment side of this decision is covered in more depth on the mini golf equipment buying guide, and the assessment you would run on a used module before committing to a move is the same assessment you would run on a demonstration unit, which is set out on the hole demonstration evaluation page. The venue-level view of how a course sits inside a larger floor - which is the drawing that decides whether your existing course fits your next room - is on the mini golf course solution page, and if the answer depends on how the course would actually sit in the new space, a free 3D layout of the new floor will show it before anything is packed.
One last note on which units suit a move rather than a rebuild. The three holes we supply most often into courses that may have to be rearranged - the Cyclone Spin Hole, with its curved lane and circular target area; the Golf Parkour obstacle challenge; and the Labyrinth Challenge interactive putting attraction - each raise the granularity question in a different way, and the notes on each one below say which.
It depends entirely on which of two products you own. In the portable family, modules are small enough to lift by hand, assemble without tools and are sold on the promise that the course can be relocated. In the semi-permanent family, the parts are standardised so holes can be refreshed and extended in place, but the installation is a permanent or semi-permanent fixture and moving it is a demolition and rebuild.
Two questions. Can one person lift a single module, and does assembly need tools? Then check the maker's own words: one portable system says its modular design allows the course to be moved, while a semi-permanent builder states plainly that some brands use modular to mean portable but that its own product is a semi-permanent or permanent installation. The maker's description is the most reliable signal.
Everything that was installed to the building rather than to the course: power feeds, containment, control equipment, sensors, embedded lighting and network cabling. The accessibility route and the sequence of compliant holes also do not travel, because they are properties of the layout, and permits and sign-offs do not travel, because they were issued for a specific address.
More than most operators expect. In one published system a hole is built from four interchangeable fairway segments plus a start and an end, and those four parts alone produce twenty-four variants of that hole. A nine-hole set in the same system is quoted at more than fifty thousand possible configurations. The practical limits are power reach, the accessibility sequence and circulation between holes.
Three, and they are the same everywhere. Powered holes can only go where power reaches them, so their positions are more restricted than passive holes. The compliant holes have to stay consecutive and on an accessible route, so a rearrangement can break compliance even when no individual hole changes. And a new running order can create a crossing where two groups meet, which is how a reconfiguration introduces a bottleneck.
There is no published relocation price from any maker in this market, so the comparison has to be quoted rather than looked up. The useful split is by family: for a portable course in a suitable room, relocating is usually the cheapest path, while for a semi-permanent course in a new room the honest comparison is against buying new, because the move is a rebuild.
Send us the room you have now and the room you are moving to, and we will return the two drawings side by side - the hole sequence, the accessible route, the power positions and the crossings where groups would meet - so you can see whether your existing course fits before anything is packed. If the answer is that it does not, the same drawing shows what would have to change, and whether a rearrangement is enough or the room needs a different course.
