Category: Recaps

The first league night of Season 14, and also the first of a new decade, saw two new members joining, Travis and Erik. Lexi and I had both been trying to recruit some new members on Facebook but were not ultimately successful. There’s still time yet to join, though! You only need to play four nights to qualify to compete in finals. We noticed the absence of Tim, who later let everyone know on Facebook that he will be unable to attend league this season. He’s become one of the big powers in the league so I hope he will be able to return soon.

League night started terribly late and I was very flustered when I arrived. Through most of this season I have arranged alternate activities for my evening class for when I need to attend league, but I could not do so this time because it was the first day of classes for me and I needed at minimum to go over the syllabus before dismissing class. Normally Joseph would start league for me in that situation but he was out of town on a work trip. Fortunately, Mike stepped in at the last minute and got attendance taken, groups organized, and the Smackdown running so that when I arrived things were all ready for me to just give the signal to start. That was a great relief as I was imagining there would be total chaos when I arrived. I tried to get out of class as early as possible but of course a student stopped me with questions, so I didn’t arrive at the bar until about 7:30. Despite this late start, we finished around the same time as usual, at least compared with our longer running nights.

This season we have a new set of banks, which I laboriously organized to take into account new games, changes of some games’ designation as “long” playing or not, and an attempt at a theme. Some of the banks are more thematic than others but there is at least some rationalization I can give for every game’s placement (even though I was constrained by not putting too many epic-length games in the same back). The theme is the Labors of Hercules, and this week was the Nemean Lion, probably one of the better known labors and also one of my more tightly themed banks. All the games had felines in them, sort of. The Simpsons (Scratchy), Deadpool (Sabertooth), Theatre of Magic (Tiger Saw), Kiss (Catman), and Batman ’66 (Catwoman).

Danny was in a jolly mood and began telling me an epic story about the time he and a friend got detained at the Canadian border returning to the US after a casino trip, for 16 hours. Just as he got to the climax of the story, I realized randos were walking up and about to start on the game we needed to play next, so I had to cut Danny off and rush over there. The rest of the night I kept wondering how the story ended.

The Smackdown game was Medieval Madness. Danny was the top qualifier and I sent Josh to find him. Josh came back leading Danny slowly down the stairs, as by then Danny was really in his cups and couldn’t really walk straight. I put up a pretty decent qualifying score but got smacked down in actual play, once again. Danny, on the other hand, completely ran away with the game, playing for ages while intermittently closing his eyes during slow moments in play. He got the catapult animation and I thought “Oh, no way he’ll hit that” and instead he got the 500K award easily on the first time through.

In between two of his balls, I thought this might be a chance to ask for the end of the story. I opened with, “So Danny, anyway, you really needed to pee and then you farted and it smelled bad…?” indicating the part of the story where he left off. He just stared at me. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I realized that I probably should have given him a little more context for that sentence.

Danny ended up winning the Smackdown, with the only person who came close to making a run for him being Lexi. This was Lexi’s first appearance in a Smackdown finals but it probably won’t be the last. Meanwhile, the B division played off on Ghostbusters, causing Josh to concede and let someone else play because he hates Ghostbusters so much. The winning score set by Derik was something like 12 million, which offended Jon so much that he later dragged me over and forced me to look at his 50 million score to prove that he could have easily beaten Derik.

After league I was tired, I hadn’t eaten dinner, and I wanted to get home until someone said the magic words “dollar games.” So, I hung around playing dollar games with people on Stranger Things (and for some reason Derik and Mike each made me do a shot with them). I put up 96 million for my last game, my best ever, but Mike still beat me. Too bad I didn’t designate that as one of my launch party games. I got home, looked in my purse, and realized the dollar I was going to pony up was still in there. I sent Mike a message on Facebook telling him I realized I forgot to put in my dollar and he immediately replied with a money request for $1. I laughed for about five minutes, and then laughed again when I told Joseph about it later. I did finally pay up when I saw Mike in person, saying, “I don’t want it to be said that I don’t pay my gambling debts.”

Our next league night is tonight, of course, and this time I should be there by about 6:30. Joseph will be present from around 5 on to take scores on our various running tournaments including Destrier of Death, Stranger Things Launch Party, and our Smackdown game, Batman ’66. See you soon!

Remember our last league night before the July hiatus? Almost two months ago? Yeah, neither do I. Let me check the photos from the night to jog my memory… er, oops? I somehow didn’t take any photos. What the heck? I can’t explain that. But wait! This is what I keep notes for! Let’s see what my notes say.

Well, first of all, the one thing I did easily remember is that a historic event occurred: the first ever perfect score. Someone had the top score on every single game for the night, and that someone was Mike. This is certainly the first time it has ever happened under my era of the league. I don’t recall it ever happening during the Matt era either, although since I don’t have records of that, it might have happened early on (and if it did, the winner-spinner-chicken-dinner was probably Chris). Mike’s achievement was unlocked on bank Calliope, the “movies/TV” bank. This means that one of the games he had to blow up was South Park, and as Tim once pointed out, that’s a game you really feel more ashamed than proud to put a good score on. Luckily this is the last time we had to play it in league, since it (along with Elvis, which I’m a bit sadder about) left for Guardians of the Galaxy and Batman ’66.

Aha, my notes also remind me that we had a few new members joining this time, namely Biff, Jett, and Logan (I swear those are real people and not extras from Captain Scarlett). At one point Logan came up to me to ask who that guy in his group was, the guy who’s really good. I figured out that he meant longtime league member Chris “Dr. Turtle”. I said that we have a lot of good people in the league now but that Chris is rather legendary for having won the first 10 seasons of the league before his winning streak was finally broken by Mike.

After league we had Tuesday Night Smackdown, as usual. The Smackdown champion, on Black Knight: Sword of Rage, was Danny, but my notes say the real excitement was in B division, where Josh ran a huge score up on Deadpool. Speaking of Deadpool, the Deadpool BOOM! tournament from Stern ended during our hiatus with Danny, Mike, and Josh in the 4th, 6th, and 7th places, respectively. That’s right: our little old Lansing Pinball League owned 30% of the worldwide leaderboard.

After the Smackdown tournament, some folks hung around to play for fun as usual. This led to an instant-classic LPL moment. Derik, while playing Metallica, began complaining, “I feel like I’m playing with a tiny little pinball here.” I asked him what he was talking about (I assumed he thought the game was too low on its legs or something). He insisted that the ball itself was “tiny.” Everyone started laughing at him because none of us could tell just by looking at the ball that anything was wrong with it. Derik got indignant and said he was going to prove it right here and now, and he opened up Metallica and laid all the balls from the game on the upended lockdown bar. We all had to admit he was right: one ball was perhaps 1/16″ smaller in diameter. I could see it when they were all lined up together, but I’m amazed that Derik could see it when they were in motion. As a result of this incident, Derik has been given the nickname “Caliper” by Russell.

We’re just about to resume the season with meeting #3 tonight at 7. We will be playing Clio, the “magic” themed bank, consisting of Black Knight: Sword of Rage, Lord of the Rings, Medieval Madness, Tales of the Arabian Nights, and Theatre of Magic.

April 23 was the eighth and final night of the regular season for Season 12. As such, it would decide who got that juicy top seed position and who would play A and B. We were on the randomly-chosen bank Calliope, the “adventure” bank, sparing us another night of South Park.

The night stands out in my mind because I nearly doubled my previous personal best on Game of Thrones. I got Blackwater going on Ball 1 (contrary to my usual GoT strategy, “just try to lock one ball per ball”), started hammering the hell out of the battering ram and shot whatever else I could. This ended up with my shooting one more Super Jackpot after multiball ended and the announcer voice was giving the final two seconds of a countdown. My group (Lexi, Lupe, and Jon) were all very excited by this. I rarely look at the score while playing as I just find it distracts me, but Lupe blurted out “You’re over a billion!” I was stunned because I have never broken a billion before. My previous best was in the 600 millions somewhere. When Ball 1 ended, Jon began shouting that I was the new queen and that he would gladly bend the knee to me. I think he was more excited than I was! Although I got another Blackwater going on Ball 2, I didn’t do anything like that Ball 1 and ended with “only” about 200 million more on the next two balls. That score earned me top game for the night on Game of Thrones and I can thank it for the fact that I edged out Josh by 1 point for the season. For my troubles I earned the right to play Danny instead of Mike first round. Yay?

Speaking of Jon, he told me again how much he loved the Critical Hit format we used for the March Hare Madness tournament and asked when I would run another one of those tournaments. I had to tell him that I was only planning to use that format for March Hare Madness, once a year, since I like to rotate formats for my charity tournaments. He asked if he could borrow my cards to run his own “just for fun” tournament and I said that as long as it was a day I could come that would be just fine. He said that he would also need my help drawing people to the tournament because, as he said, “you know how to get people to come.” I laughed at his overestimation of my sway, but of course I will do what I can. (Our next official charity tournament, by the way, will likely be in July. It will be the annual round robin tournament known as Rocket Robin.)

The other notable occurrence that I’m aware of is that Mike finally took the Grand Champion on Theatre of Magic back from Joseph, who had held it for at least two years. Joseph’s old score was around two and a half billion, and Mike knocked it down with 3.6 billion in his league game. Mike says Joseph gave him a death glare that he’s sorry I didn’t capture with the camera (although I’m not sure I would have wanted my lens shattered).

The Smackdown tournament for the night was on Deadpool, of course, since we are trying to get our league players on the Stern Deadpool Boom leader board. The league has been well represented so far. SummerSlam has subsequently taken over the job of giving Boom entry opportunities, so we will go back to picking a random Smackdown game for finals and Super-Ball/Zen night. Interest in SummerSlam has been surprisingly high already, with a lot of competition for scores, considering that it will run through the start of August. Mike won the night’s Smackdown on Deadpool and Pat came from behind with a strong third ball rally on The Beatles in the Undercard division.

The league season will be officially over after tonight’s final playoff tournament, with trophies going to the top three in each division. Will we have a third Lansing champion or will Mike defend his title? We’ll soon find out! See you at 7 pm! (And don’t forget you can check the regular season finishing positions on our league’s Google doc, here.)

April 9th was the seventh league night of the season and, as we have only six banks, I randomly drew from among the sixth to see which one we would be repeating. The answer was Clio, the “Cartoons” bank, which includes The Addams Family, Deadpool, Iron Man, The Simpsons Pinball Party, and South Park. Yes, that’s right. We have had to play South Park three times this season. On the up side, I did not draw Polyhymnia (the other South Park-containing bank) for our final night.

Prior to the start of the night, Joseph had a great game on The Munsters, setting the Grand Champion score as well as every one of the vanity scores (such as the various character champions). For my part, I had a quite-good game on the Smackdown game, Iron Maiden, in the process beating Joseph’s qualifying score by 2 million. Er, sorry, dear?

We had just a little bit of candy left from March Hare Madness. Needless to say, it was gone by the end of the night. No, I take it back. There were about three bird’s egg malt balls left and I ate them. What we did not have is the shirts people won in the drawing at MHM, because they arrived in the mail the day after league. Of course they did. I will bring them to league tomorrow.

Back to South Park: Mike ended up putting a high score on it, which he was suitably ashamed of. So, after years of no one breaking into the ridiculously high default score table, suddenly everyone is doing it. Mike also threatened to start putting my initials in. For those just joining us, this is a reference to Chris’s past habit of putting my initials all over Austin Powers. I think I still nearly owned the high score board on that infernal thing when it left.

Our Smackdown game was Iron Maiden. What a refreshing change of pace. Don’t worry, though; soon we’ll be back to overusing one specific game for the Smackdown. This time it will be Deadpool, which is receiving its own version of the leader board tournament from Stern. Derik won (and, prompted by me, stated his approval of the “April Showers” motif I had drawn on the medal). Lexi hadn’t competed in a Smackdown finals before, and ended up just below the cut line for the Undercard division. I went to break the bad news to her, but suddenly Joseph decided he didn’t need to play after all, so Lexi got to play. The Undercard was on Ghostbusters. No one ran away with it, but I walked a bit faster and won with something like 30 million.

Tomorrow (yeah, yeah, actually today) we will have our very last night of the regular season. At the end of the night we will know how many people can qualify for A and who is in (or at least who is guaranteed in if everyone shows up to finals). We will be meeting, as usual, at 7 pm. In the meantime, you can check your current standing in our Google spreadsheet.

It was an exciting week-plus for the league as we had League Night #6 on 3/26 followed by March Hare Madness, the Stephen T. Kendrick Memorial Pinball Tournament, on 4/2. (More on that second one in another post, I hope.) We would be playing Polyhymnia, the bank created to account for the fact that Munsters gave us our 26th game, disrupting the plan to have five banks of five. For Polyhymnia, league members got to vote on their favorite “short,” “medium,” and “long” playing games (according to the categories created prior to the start of the season to fill out the initial banks). The chosen games plus The Munsters would make up bank Polyhymnia, whose name means “many praises.” Next season, there will be a new vote, so the bank will probably change.

For some reason, enough people voted for South Park to secure it a place in the bank (partly through luck, since I had to randomly break a several-way tie). Worse, some of those demented individuals didn’t even come to the league night where the rest of us had to play it! And worst of all, the random bank I drew for Week 7 (tonight) is Clio, which also has South Park in it. Thanks, guys. The other games chosen for Polyhymnia were Attack from Mars, Indiana Jones, and Iron Maiden.

Speaking of Iron Maiden, my entire group tore up Iron Maiden, with 9-digit scores all around and me earning my first 300+ score ever. Then we all got beaten up by The Munsters. I think no one broke 100M on Ball 1. Bryan asked, “Did someone do something to offend it?”

Attendance was light, a stark contrast with the previous night’s record attendance. We were missing the Chad/Tyler combo and the Caleb/Lupe/Lexi nexus. I believe the K12 schools’ spring break had something to do with this. (College spring break is always a lot earlier.)

At one point Todd asked me why I hated South Park, having noticed all my cranky remarks about it in league Facebook posts and being relatively unfamiliar with it himself. I can’t remember what reason I gave beyond “it’s South Park,” but later in the evening Todd came up to me and declared, “I love South Park!” Apparently it treated him well. I started out bad on it and complained, but Tim said, “Doing well on South Park is a mark of shame.” Tim went on to put up over 300 million and get the first high score entry anyone in the league has ever done (the defaults are ridiculously high). Later, Joseph beat him, and ran over to me pointing at the game angrily and complaining, “Look at this! Look at this!” as though he were dismayed by doing so well on it. I ended up having a not-terrible game after all with a third ball rally. I won the video mode, and without any exaggeration, I was out of breath afterward. (Postscript: Tim went on to take the high score on the game back away from Joseph a few days later. Joseph says he would congratulate Tim, but “it means he played a lot of South Park, or at least a game of South Park.”)

On Attack from Mars, someone noticed the initials “DAS” and wondered who that is. Mike suggested that Derik had put his real initials in, rather than his standard “RED.” “Derik Allen Schimberg?” someone asked, and this set off a string of guesses: “Alex,” “Arthur,” and so on, until Mike came up with “Derik Amadeus Schimberg.”

Our Tuesday Night Smackdown game was Road Show and the undercard was Star Trek. Joseph bulldozed his way to a Smackdown championship medal. The Undercard went to Mike. It was our first time having an upstairs game in Tuesday Night Smackdown in a while, and I think people were relieved to get out of the alcove for a change. (I’m sentimental about that alcove, though. That used to be where all our games were, in the early league days.)

Tonight we’re playing bank Clio, the “cartoons and comics” bank, and will have our Tuesday Night Smackdown bout on Iron Maiden. I hope to see you all at 7 pm (or hopefully a bit earlier so you can start laying the smack down)!

The league night of March 12 was our fifth of the season, meaning that Season 12 is officially over the hill. Time to go buy some black balloons from Party City. It was also a surprisingly short night, finishing by 9:30, despite high attendance.

We played bank Calliope, themed to “adventure” (yes, it’s a vague theme). Calliope was the designated backup bank, but we hadn’t needed to switch out any games so far this season. Star Trek: The Next Generation is now in this bank, replacing Getaway, so it made its first appearance as a league game. Originally I had announced that we might not be able to play it, because it was locking balls when lock wasn’t lit and lighting locks when they shouldn’t be. Derik really wanted us to be able to use it, though, so he put in some work on it over the weekend and it was working fine by league night. Actually, I think it did have a malfunction: it was sucking balls to the outlane and refusing to let me do anything. I think Derik needs to give it a stern talking-to. There’s also the weird fact that my ST:TNG score for the night was almost exactly the same as my Game of Thrones score.

Lexi returned to the league after being away a season or so. Reports were that she had some very good games; Lupe told me, “I think she might be a natural.” Our turnout was 19 people, the most this season. If we ever crest 20 we’ll have to take some creative measures, since the league format isn’t designed to accommodate more than that (five games with four players on each one). My plan is to add a sixth game and then take each player’s best five results for the night. That way players who can’t stay for an extra long league night can leave after five games, making their sixth optional.

I had a great Lord of the Rings game (after complaining heartily about having to play it) but the rest of the night was a downhill slide, starting with a mediocre Game of Thrones and ending with bad games on everything else. Meanwhile I was trying to grade (halfheartedly) and chatting with Lupe about WPPRs, those famous “invisible Internet points.” Actually called World Pinball Player Ranking Points, they are what gives every player who has played in an IFPA sanctioned tournament or league (like ours) a world ranking. They qualify people for the state championship as well as a separate world championship (and the Women’s World Championship, which I played in back in 2017). Love them or hate them, they shape the pinball landscape, especially here in Michigan. Lupe wanted to know more about how the system works and I explained that our Smackdown tournaments are a way of raising the “value” of our league from the IFPA’s perspective, in addition to having become a popular tradition. Lupe was very eager to know where she could go to mine more points. Uh oh.

During the night I posted a poll to determine the composition of our miscellaneous bank. Now that we have 26 games we needed a new bank with our new Munsters plus four more games. The bank is called Polyhymnia (the Muse of religious poetry; her name means “many praises”) and its composition will be decided by a new poll each season. I voted for Indiana Jones, which we were about to play as part of bank Calliope, and then I wished I hadn’t because I played it awfully. I could have changed my vote but I decided to stick with it and it won a spot. I hope I don’t regret that tonight. For some reason, several sick so-and-sos voted for South Park and we’ll have to play that too. (I think one of those sadists was Lupe, who isn’t even going to be there tonight because she’s on vacation!)

We had a Smackdown game on Kiss, with the Undercard playing off on Deadpool. Danny won the Smackdown and Tim was the Undercard winner.

I’ll be seeing you all tonight at 7 pm for our sixth meeting of the season!