Lansing Pinball League

The annual Stephen T. Kendrick Memorial Pinball Tournament, held in memory of my rabbit Stephen who died in 2016, returned to The Avenue on March 18. This tournament benefits RASA Rescue (Rabbit and Small Animal Rescue) of Westland, the rescue from which I adopted Stephen in 2007. In recent years this tournament has used a timed matchplay format with a Critical Hit deck. This deck, which for some strange reason is IFPA-legal, allows shenanigans such as putting tilt warnings on someone else’s game, forcing someone to switch scores with you mid-game, and shuffling players between groups.

Last year a half dozen of my Critical Hit cards were found to be missing at the end of the tournament, and despite appeals and searches, they never turned up. At the time the deck was out of print and impossible to obtain. This year, however, a new printing has finally come out, and I bought a second deck to combine with my original for more cards. The author recommends a deck for every 20 people or so and with only 12 players this year it was more cards than necessary, but it’s always better to have too many than too few.

Joseph had an idea for a new rule to allow more cards to be passed out and hopefully encourage more card use earlier in the tournament. In the past we have often found that people hoard cards for the first few rounds and then never get around to using all of them by the end. This time we gave out cards not just for each extra ball earned as usual, but also for coming in last in a round. This new rule proved popular and did encourage players to use cards earlier and more freely.

With twelve players, we played three groups of four every round, and what kept happening was people using cards to avoid being in a group with Danny. In one of the first rounds I used a “move player to a random other group” card to get Danny out of my group, but it was a tough group overall and I didn’t really want to play anyone in it. The next time that card came up, someone pointed out that it doesn’t say the random player has to be a random other player, and used it to move themselves out of a group. I realized that’s what I should have done earlier. Lesson learned. Another popular card was one that makes your group cover the game’s display, and since Derik ended up being dealt a lot of them, he used it several rounds running.

In the last qualifying round, I was playing Stephanie, Greg, and Linda on Monster Bash, and I was very nervous. I was working on setting up the usual modes-into-multiball but I knew that Stephanie was holding one of the most powerful cards, the one that forces someone to take their hands off the flippers and drain their ball as soon as the card is played (and then they get a compensation ball afterward). Stephanie had shown it to me and asked me to explain it to her, and I told her how it worked and gave an example of using it to stop someone from playing multiball. So, as I got ready to start multiball on Ball 3, I was just waiting for Stephanie to throw that card down on the glass. I braced myself but to my surprise it didn’t happen, and I pulled into second (Linda won the match). Instead, she threw it down on Greg as he started his multiball, in order to get herself into third place instead of fourth. She just didn’t want to finish out the tournament with a last and figured Greg was a better target.

I had bought three resin rabbits to use for trophy toppers, two golds and a silver, and painted one of the gold ones with bronze paint so they would be Olympic medal colors. Only afterward did I remember that I always try to give four trophies for tournaments with a four-player finals. I was so busy I almost skipped doing it, but then I thought, “If I make finals I just know I’ll get fourth and I don’t want to be the one with no trophy.” I ended up having to make a very tiny and ad hoc trophy with a small plastic rabbit I had left over from some past set of trophies perched on top. The first through third place trophies were big and grand, and the fourth looked like the booby prize. I had a premonition that I was going to end up getting it.

The four qualifiers were Danny, me, Devon, and Tim. Danny was top seed and got to choose a bank. I had created three banks, each of which had one modern Stern game, one Stern DMD game, and one Williams game. Danny grumbled, “All these banks suck,” and I pointed out that I had done him a favor and put Godzilla in one of them. Unsurprisingly, that’s the one he chose. The other two games were Getaway and KISS.

Possibly the most dramatic moment happened in the first game on Getaway. Tim played Trollololo, a card that allows a player to shake another player’s game before they plunge, in an attempt to give them tilt warnings. If they tilt instead, the affected player gets a compensation ball and a random card from the tilter’s hand. Tim played it against Danny, and appeared to neatly put two tilt warnings on the game, but then the ball plunged into play. The question was, should this be a disqualification, as though Tim had played out of turn? I delegated ruling to Joseph since I was in the match. Because the match was streaming, he was able to go to the tape, so to speak. Peter brought up the video of the incident and on careful study Joseph could see that Tim had not touched the shifter and therefore the ball plunging was the game’s error, not Tim’s. Joseph ruled that since the card permitted Tim to touch the game, but they hadn’t touched the plunger, it couldn’t be seen as player error. He ruled compensation ball for Danny but no disqualification and also Tim did not have to surrender a card as there was no tilt. When it was Tim’s turn, Danny retaliated by also playing Trollololo, walking up, and intentionally tilting. This is something I have seen players do before and I think the card’s author perhaps did not consider that the penalty of surrending a card in your hand for tilting is not high enough to stop people from strategically taking an intentional foul. The game ended with a first for Devon, a second for Danny, a third for me, and in a shocking upset, a last for Tim on one of their strongest games.

In the next round on KISS, Tim recovered with a first, I got second, Danny got third, and Devon got fourth. That meant that going into finals, the scores were Danny and me with three points each, and Tim and Devon with four each. With a near tie, it was anyone’s tournament, except for the fact that the last game was on Godzilla, a Danny stronghold. On Ball 1, no one did much and the scores were very low, but at least I had started setting some things up. Devon then played Bomba, a card that nullifies the current game after Ball 1 and causes a restart. After the restart, there was another low-scoring Ball 1, and Devon played a card that forces someone to switch players with you after the first ball. He played it against me as I had the highest of the group of low scores, so I felt like I had gotten disadvantaged twice this round. Ultimately, Danny got first, Tim got second, Devon got third, and I got fourth. The final scores were Danny 7, Tim 6, Devon 5, and Heather 3. Reader, I took home that afterthought of a fourth place trophy just as my intuition told me I would. Devon was very pleased with his trophy, as it was his first trophy in a tournament outside of league finals.

The tournament was a lot of fun as always and, most importantly, it raised $228 for RASA Rescue, which will be used to support their mission of fostering pet rodents and rabbits, many of whom have special medical needs. Thanks to all the player and other donors, including Pinball Pete’s.

This article was edited on 4/9/25 to include more detail on the final match, particularly the way cards were used.