Believe it or not, our last league meeting was almost a month ago, on September 22, making this the longest in-season gap we’ve had since our famous COVID mid-season hiatus. This resulted from two factors: first, that September had five Tuesdays, meaning we were scheduled for one of our rare three-week gaps; and second, that last week’s scheduled league meeting was postponed due to a surprise event at The Avenue. Naturally, this didn’t stop me from procrastinating working on the recap until the night before our next meeting (see also: the COVID hiatus).
Last time we finished up the rotation of the banks I dubbed Hazel and Bigwig, so we can now see how things shook out. Our top scorer on Hazel was Danny, despite underperforming with a mere 1.0B on Godzilla. Danny also took top honors on Bigwig, which included a 93M game on The Simpsons and 790M on Rush. Unsurprisingly, Danny is currently on top of the league as we wrap up the first half of the season.
Our Tuesday Night Smackdown game was The Munsters, and the B division “undercard” match was played on Star Trek. Tim was the Munsters champion and Joseph was the Star Trek winner. As we finished, the staff were turning off the games upstairs to prepare for an early (midnight) closing, and we waved goodbye to Danny, who was still standing there playing Godzilla surrounded by dark machines.
Since our last meeting we have also had the Fear and Trembling Charity Tournament to support the Capital Area Humane Society. This year was our tenth annual tournament and the course had the theme of “all the non-Stern games,” so I called it “Fear and Trembling X: The No-Sternament.” I think this went the smoothest of all the pingolf tournaments I have run, with no major problems arising with any of the objectives, and no game malfunctions that mattered for the tournament. It also got done at a reasonable hour for a change. We used a mix of some objectives we’ve used in past years and a good number of completely new ones, and I think everyone probably learned at least something about the rules for every game in the course. I had a lot of fun and it seemed like others did too. The only real problem was that we had a five-way tie to get into playoffs and I had only planned for it to be four or fewer people with the format I announced (fastest person – by ball number – to get to blowing up a saucer on AfM, then if that’s a tie, fastest to get to two saucers…). We ended up having one player (randomly selected to be Brian) go first and just play a full game and record number of saucers blown up on each ball, then have the other four play together. Brian blew up so many saucers total, including three on the first ball, that he was almost certainly through, but we had to eliminate three of the five so it turned into a battle for second best and Mackenzie made it through. Danny pointed out that if we had actually used a stopwatch to time number of seconds to first saucer blowup Brian would have also won handily because he had the first saucer knocked down so fast I didn’t even see how it happened – probably inside of 30 seconds. Maybe we’ll try doing it that way next time.
Our finals was done with pingolf match play, awarding points for first/second/third/fourth to complete an objective and dividing points for ties. The final standings were Brian first, Tim second, Derik third, and Mackenzie fourth.
Devon, Peter, and Brian decided to show up after the event last Tuesday and play their league games, but for everyone else, the rescheduled league night is at hand and we will start the next bank rotation between “Fiver” and “Vilthuril.” This is the last chance for new players to join up and still qualify for playoffs this season!
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