The league night of 7/26/22 was our 6th night of the season and, being an even numbered night, finished up a rotation of two banks. The banks were “Athena” and “Hades,” according to the naming scheme that only Joseph and I – mostly I – care about. Athena was originally slated to include Star Trek: The Next Generation, Avengers: Infinity Quest, Rush, Jurassic Park, and Black Knight: Sword of Rage, but ST:TNG had left the venue and was replaced by its successor, Cactus Canyon. Hades included AC/DC, Indiana Jones, Deadpool, Ghostbusters, and Stranger Things.
I didn’t take any photos of league night until after Tuesday Night Smackdown, which is probably a consequence of my working on Calculus homework during league (a common occurrence this season), so I’m sorry for the relative lack of photos in this update.
I continued in my previous night’s group with Jason and Danny. We ended up finished last of all the groups, by far. This is no credit to me; I had a very poor night, including an abysmal game of Black Knight in which I had the opportunity to start the last chance multiball and was screaming in frustration as I failed over and over to lock the last ball needed. No, it was mostly due to Danny, who blew up a few games. I mentioned this to Mike, who replied with the advice, “Always be Danny.”
Smackdown winners Mike (A Division) and Tim (B Division).
Tuesday Night Smackdown was on Metallica, with the B division playing finals (and rubbing elbows) on Stranger Things. Mike won the A division and Tim, as usual, won the B, or as he would have it, “Best” Division with another big Smackdown game. After the Smackdown, Joseph, Tim, and I played a game of Stranger Things together which I won, making me feel a little bit better after my embarrassingly bad league night. By then, almost everyone else had left except Mike, who was chatting with former league member (and founding member) Russell. Joseph and I had to leave in the morning for our short summer vacation trip so we packed up and headed home.
Jason is out for revenge after losing Tuesday Night Smackdown to Mike!
Starting tonight we will have our final bank rotation between “Ares” (The Simpsons, The Walking Dead, Star Wars, Star Trek, and Attack from Mars) and “Zeus” (Tales of the Arabian Nights, Scared Stiff, Guns N’ Roses, Cactus Canyon, and Getaway). See you soon!
Before I start the recap for July 12, I need to recount a story I had forgotten to put in the previous recap, and that is something that happened at the very end of the night when a few of us were still hanging around playing Avengers. I was trying to do some Calculus homework at a table nearby, and suddenly I heard Mike and Allen taking turns rattling off lists of very random-seeming words that started with “A.” I got up and asked them what they heck they were doing and learned that Josh had bet Mike and Allen $500 that they could not guess his middle name. He added that even if they could guess it, they wouldn’t be able to pronounce it. Due to his pinball initials, JAB, they knew it started with an A. I made two guesses and got it on the second one. Josh got a look on his face like I had just thrown a snake on him. Unfortunately, he says that he specifically did not extend the bet to me or Joseph. The actual middle name is left as an exercise for the reader.
No doubt Allen is explaining something about G N’ R to Derik.
Now on to the current recap. It was Night 5, and we started a new rotation of the banks called Athena and Hades. We had a couple of fluke occurrences, one of them being that Derik came to me to say that his group had their game of Cactus Canyon reset when a little kid came up and hit the start button. I’m surprised that happened, since I think it would have required holding the button down for several seconds, but that’s as much as I know about the situation. The other is that Allen played out of turn at one point, forcing me to rule a DQ for him on one game. Since that got entered as a zero machine score, I told him that he was definitely “in the running” for the Worst Score Award for Season 16. He said, “In the running? You mean someone’s going to do worse than zero?” I said, “Well, someone could tie it.” His reply was, “What do we do then? A one-ball plunge off to break the tie?” Everyone loved that idea and someone else added on the idea that the plunge off should be on The Flip Side, which I use for tiebreakers in my charity tournaments.
Joseph helps me get things ready by making the slips for people to draw their group assignment from the hat.
Speaking of charity tournaments, the week following last league night (in other words, as of this writing, last week), was the summer charity tournament, Rocket Robin. Ever since the first one I have been reusing a piece of art I drew for the original poster, which I was very proud of. The art depicts a robin saluting, wearing a cap with a logo on it, standing in front of a retro-futuristic spaceship. My inspiration for this art was the 1950s TV show Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, which was a favorite of my father’s growing up. As a result I saw it on VHS a lot as a kid. The robin’s cap and the spaceship are both taken from Rocky Jones. The reason I point this out is that near the end of league night, Joseph asked if I noticed what was showing on The Avenue’s TV. I looked down from the mezzanine and to my surprise it was Rocky Jones. I thought this seemed auspicious for the success of my upcoming tournament and said so.
Dan and Donny wait their turn on a game.
Our Tuesday Night Smackdown was played on the brand new Guns N’ Roses game. Allen already knows the game inside and out and was freely offering advice. No one was surprised when Allen got the A division medal (which I drew a rose on). Tim won the B division game on Indiana Jones. Tim has a lot of good luck in the B division, or as he calls it, the Best Devision. He had a walk-off Ball 3 win, but since the tournament was over he went ahead and played the rest of his game after I took the winners’ photo, and set the Grand Champion score.
Jason plays Guns N’ Roses in the Smackdown tournament.
At the end of the night, Joseph and I played Guns N’ Roses with Jason, who also knows the game very well and was teaching it to us. To be honest, it’s so complicated I could only retain one or two things he told me. I’m not the greatest with modern rulesets. I did get to play a song, though, and of course being a Paul McCartney fan I picked “Live and Let Die.” The game puts on an impressive light show and is very fun and exciting to play, especially when you get the song multiball going.
Allen and Tim celebrating their Smackdown wins.
That’s all for last time’s recap, just in time as usual for our league night tonight at 7. We’ll be playing the rest of the Bank 5/6 rotation.
June 28 was the end of the first half of Season 16, with groups finishing their tour of banks Poseidon and Hermes. A couple of people also still needed to play makeups on Lord of the Rings from the week that it was down: Brian because he was absent last league night, and Allen because he just plain forgot. I still had the sheet we had used to write scores down for the makeup, and left it out for Brian when we went to play. Since I arrived with plenty of time before league, I was able to watch most of Brian’s game. When I did my makeup, I had an excellent (for me) game in which I destroyed the ring for the first time ever. When Joseph wrote my score down, he also drew a little picture of a ring and put an X next to it, to indicate “destroyed the ring.” Well, as I watched, Brian also destroyed the ring, and beat my (not very good) ring champion time too, so I drew a little ring-and-X icon to match the one Joseph did.
Josh gets some time in on Avengers: Infinity Quest after league.
I’m very sorry to say that league came to the end and I realized I had not taken any photos, so all my photos of the night are of the Smackdown winners and then some hanging around and playing Avengers: Infinity Quest afterward. I don’t have too much to report; it was a pretty ordinary league night, fortunately without any games needing to be switched out this time. Biff once again dropped in to visit and play a qualifying Smackdown game, although he did not stick around for finals.
Hmmmm… you know, Allen suddenly appeared in Lansing from out of town… I think his shirt is taunting us to guess his TRUE IDENTITY. I’m onto you (as soon as I check with my brother, who once met Banksy in Bristol).
Speaking of the Smackdown, it was Elvira’s House of Horrors, which is why the Smackdown medalists can see that I drew a spooooooky ghost on the medals. The A division (won by Allen) actually finished before the B division, which got them some razzing. The B division game was on Guardians of the Galaxy. Mike won and humblebragged that it was his first B division Smackdown medal.
Allen and Mike showing off their Smackdown “medals.”
Oh yes, and Allen also played his Lord of the Rings makeup game after league. He more than doubled Brian’s and my scores (which were very close together) and, yeah, destroyed the ring. Thoroughly defeated, I drew the little picture on the score sheet one more time.
Allen, Josh, and Bryan seem interested in someone’s gameplay; Mike, on the other hand, is apparently asleep on his feet.
We started another two-bank rotation on June 14, which was the third night of Season 16. The banks for this one are named Poseidon for the god of the sea (and, oddly, also horses) and Hermes for the messenger of the gods. Most of the game choices in Poseidon are pretty self-explanatory. Hermes’ bank is a bit more mercurial (get it?) but it helps to know that in addition to being fast, he carried the caduceus, a staff entwined with serpents. I kind of had to stretch for some of the banks because the most important thing was balancing the game locations.
Joseph and I arrived early in order to play a makeup game of Lord of the Rings, which had unfortunately been down during League Night #2. Tim was the other early bird and he played with us. I am not normally very strong on LotR, which is evidenced by the fact that it’s been at the Avenue as long as I’ve been playing pinball there and yet I’ve never completed Destroy the Ring mode. I’ve started it a bunch of times, but I always get nervous with Frodo yelling at me and end up draining. It was the first wizard mode I ever saw, actually. My first ever league night I arrived to see a bunch of people clustered around watching a guy (it was Chris T., but I didn’t know him yet) destroy the ring. So even though it’s objectively not that hard to start and not that hard to complete, it still has this legendary status in my mind. Anyway, during my league makeup game, I somehow not only started it but actually finished it, despite getting so nervous for the last couple shots that I got the shaky hands.
Donny destroys Batman ’66.
I ended up grouped with Joseph (for the first time in quite a long time) and Donny for this week’s league games. Donny had his own moment of glory when he totally blew up Batman ’66 on ball 1. He then also blew up the first of the two extra balls he earned on ball 1, then sadly had to plunge off the second one, per league rules. The rest of his game didn’t measure up to that first ball, but who cares, when your first ball is that good?
This is the state of things after Donny’s first ball of Batman ’66. And that’s not including the one extra ball he got to play after this, which brought his score to almost 2 and a half billion before he had to plunge off a second e-ball.
Tuesday Night Smackdown was on Avengers: Infinity Quest, which actually should have been the Smackdown our first league night since it was the newest game then, but I forgot. We had a special guest appearance by Biff, who played in the league prior to the hiatus but had not returned since. He told me that he is too busy with family now. He did play in our Tuesday Night Smackdown and I finally got to tell him that I won a blue ribbon at the 2021 Calhoun County Fair with a photo of him at league that I took in 2019.
Remember Biff? He was back (for a limited time)!
The Smackdown Champion was Jason, who set up the fun pose for his winners’ photo. Tim won the Undercard on The Munsters.
Jason brandishes the Double Danger Gem.So which is cooler: Tim’s Smackdown Undercard medal/button, or his Moro shirt? OK, I know it’s the shirt, but I did color the medal in honor of it being Flag Day!
Finally, I want to extend a league welcome to our newest member, Kayl, whom I unfortunately seem not to have gotten any pictures of this time. Kayl is familiar to many due to being on the staff of The Avenue, and previously played in the March Hare Madness charity tournament.
It’s been three weeks since our last league night on May 24 so it’s quite possible you don’t ‘member it. So here I am with the league night recap to jog your memberies, I mean memories.
Brian getting in a game of Cactus Canyon.
If you ‘member even further back, you’ll recall that during League Night #1 we had to switch out two games due to malfunctions. This is no big deal when it happens during an odd-numbered league night. But now that we use a two-bank rotation scheme, having it happen during an even-numbered night causes problems. The game can’t just be switched because half the league would have played it already. And unfortunately, that’s what happened during League Night #2. The night got off on the wrong foot with the news that Lord of the Rings was down. Joseph broke it while practicing on it over the weekend. Thaaaaaaanks, Joseph. Just kidding – actually, the slingshot rubber broke while he was playing, which would have just happened during league otherwise. It was better to go into the night already knowing the game was out. As a result, half the league only played four games, making it a short night for many people. The people who weren’t able to play LotR that night will have to make it up before or after League Night #3.
Mike’s in luck: they have ranch dressing in the vending machine!
Longtime league player and previous champion Danny C. missed League Night #1, and last season had been having more trouble getting work off for league, so I thought he might not play this season. He made a sudden late appearance as most of the league play had finished for the night (he was surprised that there were no groups for him to join in progress, but it was a fast-moving night), but well ahead of the new official cutoff for starting league play for the night. Due to several really late nights for me and Joseph last season trying to accommodate late starters, we made a new rule this season that league play can start late but must start by 10 pm, which is around when I’m normally starting the Smackdown tournament.
Allen shows off the medal he won on Cactus Canyon in the Tuesday Night Smackdown side tournament.
We had our Tuesday Night Smackdown tournament on the Avenue’s newest game, the Cactus Canyon remake. There were a lot of high scores in qualifying. One of the league’s newest players, Johnny, qualified to play in the B division, but disappeared while I was tabulating scores and missed out on playing finals. I had told him he was definitely qualified, but either he didn’t hear me or just plain needed to call it a night. In the A division, Allen took home another plastic medal/button, Joseph got second, Jason was third, and Brian was fourth. The B division played off on Star Trek. Tim dominated the field, already far in the lead when his walk-off ball three came around. I got second, Josh got third, and Dan N. got fourth.
Tim shows off his score (a walk-off) on Star Trek in the Tuesday Night Smackdown B finals.
Our next league night is in a few short hours and Joseph and I will be coming early to supervise Smackdown games and makeups on Lord of the Rings. It’s also not too late for new members to join! I hope to see you all tonight!
Mike looks less than thrilled to be playing The Simpsons, somehow.
Season 15 of the league finished up on April 12 with our traditional post-season split flipper tournament, Super-Ball XV, also known as the Zen Tournament. We had an even number turn up this time, so no one got to (or had to) play on two teams. Tim, who missed most of the second half of Season 15, happily reappeared for the event, teaming up with Jason. Mike (who has been on the most winning teams in the history of the tournament) usually tries to defend his Zen wins with the same partner, but his partner from last year, Josh, was out sick. Instead he teamed up with Joe P. The other teams were Derik and Allen, Brian and Bryan (AKA “Team Bry/ian”), and of course me and Joseph.
Jason and Tim play Star Wars as Brian watches.
I thought the Dream Team was going to be Tim and Jason, though their seeding undervalued them due to Tim’s being out for much of Season 15. Instead they took third and the finals were between Derik/Allen and Mike/Joe. Joseph and I managed to barely survive one round in the loser bracket, trading extremely close games with Team Bry/ian (they won by about 15,000 points on The Beatles and we won by about a million on The Addams Family; I forget what our third game was on).
Jason and Tim conferring about strategy.
Mike and Joe unfortunately failed to defend the title on behalf of Josh. Derik and Allen decided to take a sassy photo with the trophies, and then took a “real one.” Derik told me, “use whichever one you want.” I’ll use both.
The gracious winners?
That’s more like it.
Super-Ball XV was a bit low on attendance, but as usual it was big on fun. The tradition goes back to the first league season and was originated by the league’s original director, Matt. It will be back next season as always, and many seasons to come, I hope! Speaking of seasons, Season 16 will be starting tomorrow after a short delay due to the bar being closed for a few days during our intended starting week. This is a great time to join or rejoin the league. We have a new bank theme this season, “The Olympian Gods,” continuing the Greek mythology theme that I have used for several seasons.
The season 15 final playoffs on March 22 ended with Mike successfully defending his Lansing Pinball League champion title in a final match against Derik. Allen finished third and was gracious enough to wait around until the very late final match played out so we could get a winners’ photo. (A couple of times we have staged two photos so the third place could go home, with the first and second place swapping trophies, but Mike developed a superstition that it was unlucky to touch the first place trophy before the end of the tournament, so that brief custom has been retired.) Allen hadn’t seen one of our special etched glass awards before and was impressed by them. Someone (maybe Derik) told him, “you can take that to Texas with you,” referring to the upcoming Texas Pinball Festival.
Various players play finals matches in the alcove.
This was our largest finals ever, with A division comprising 12 people, an expansion made possible by having an unprecedented 24 people play at least half the season. This resulted in a very long tournament, with Mike, the leader of the winner bracket, going out to his car to take a nap while the second-chance bracket dragged on. I began to have very serious concerns that the tournament might not finish before the bar closed at 1 am and I was having to think about what to do if that happened. We would have had to postpone the end of the tournament for a night that Derik and Mike were available.
Allen, Derik, and Mike, with their third, second, and first place awards, respectively.
Instead, when the final match came around, Mike did me a solid by picking The Beatles (one of the very few shorter-playing games left in the venue). He won the game and so Derik picked Tales of the Arabian Nights. On Mike’s last ball, he tilted a huge bonus and figured that it had likely cost him the game. It was a very surprising tilt because he hadn’t made any big moves with the game. In the photo, you can see how surprised and offended he was.
Mike reconsiders his life choices.
Derik had a good last ball and at a certain point Mike and Joseph began saying that he certainly had won on bonus. I told them not to say anything because it would be “coaching” and we had to wait until he actually passed Mike’s score. Moments later Derik tilted, causing Mike to cry out, “No! Derik!” This ended the night without having to go into a second round. For me this was good news, because another round certainly have resulted in us failing to finish before last call. Mike was rather distraught, saying he didn’t want to win that way, and Derik said he didn’t care: “I’ll sleep like a baby tonight.”
Derik plays Mike in the first game of the final match.
I think Joseph would want me to mention that he actually knocked out the number one seed, Josh, in the second chance bracket. Despite this, Joseph finished only a modest fifth. As this was his starting seed, he said that he had made technically the least improvement of anyone.
Todd poses with his third place B division award.
Over in B division, things also ran long but not quite as long. After securing third place, Todd had to take his photo and leave, because he was in danger of turning into a pumpkin at that late hour. That left Donny and Bryan to have two final matches, a fitting match-up because Bryan was the number one seed and Donny the number two. Donny came through the second-chance bracket and won the first round, but lost the second, making Bryan the B division champion for Season XV.
B division champ Bryan and second place Donny.
We did also have a Tuesday Night Smackdown on Getaway. I put up a great score in my one qualifying attempt, which later led me astray when I decided to pick it during finals and thoroughly faceplanted. Jason won the Smackdown but he had me get in the photo as a fellow finalist so you can see a very rare selfie by me. Unfortunately we had only one person available to play in B division so Jen won by default, playing a solo game of Indiana Jones for the title.
Jason wanted a group photo but two of the finalists wandered off, so we just got Jason’s winner photo with me trying for a selfie (badly).
That concludes Season XV, except for Super-Ball XV: The Zen Tournament, happening tonight. That is our traditional post-season, just-for-fun-and-a-corny-trophy split flipper tournament. I have already heard that defending Zen champions Josh and Mike are both out, so we will be crowning a new champion.
March 8 was the final regular night for Season 15, and so it would determine the final standings for the playoffs on March 22. As a result, the competition was really heated, especially for the top seed positions in A division. I had been allowing anyone who came late to still play their league games provided they arrived before Joseph and I left for the night. This night pushed that to an extreme, as both Mike and Danny were held up at work. Because of the tight competition, neither one was about to give up a night’s points. Mike ended up arriving around 10 pm but Danny didn’t know when he would be able to come. Joseph volunteered to wait as long as it took for Danny to make it, but that ended up being nearly midnight. I actually left as Danny arrived, leaving Joseph in charge, because I had things I had to do before bed and school in the morning. According to Joseph, by the time Danny and thus the league session finished, the bar had turned off most of the pinball machines and they were about to start closing up.
Brian plays Rush in the Smackdown finals.
Even if not for that, it would have been a late night. First, league was unusually long for our new format. My group ended up backed up for ages behind Joseph’s group as he played a huge (I mean, not Eric Stone huge, but Lansing huge) game of Batman ’66. In retrospect, I really should have just skipped over them to KISS, but I was held back by knowing that in the past skipping groups caused problems and backups. This was a time I really should have made an exception: we ended up waiting probably 45 minutes. Sorry, Lexi and Nate!
Joseph awards the B division Smackdown medal to Jim for his win on Junk Yard.
Then there was the Smackdown. We had just gotten a new game, Rush, and so as is my usual habit for new games, I made it the Tuesday Night Smackdown game. When “Rush” was first announced as Stern’s next pinball theme, Joseph joked, “I’m looking forward to the guaranteed 17-minute play time.” When we arrived and set up the Smackdown tournament, we quickly discovered that the joke had come true, it is a really long-playing game. Only four people (playing together) managed to get a qualifying game in before league started. During finals, on Ball 3, Jason (player 2) had played a really huge game, putting him far in the lead, and Brian (player 3) was now up. It had already been going on for ages at this point. Then the game decided to completely crash and reset. I had written down a 4th place already for Player 1 (Joe) as his position was already determined, but no one else’s was, and I had not recorded any scores. As a result I had to rule a complete restart of the game between everyone except Joe. After another long game, Allen emerged the winner.
Jim shows off his medal.
Around the same time that Rush reset, Mike was playing his league game of Batman ’66, and that also reset. I wondered at first whether the two issues were due to a power fluctuation, but it turned out that Mike’s reset and the Rush reset were about five minutes apart. Fortunately, Joseph was observing Mike’s game and was able to attest the approximate score, and so I ruled that Mike could keep that score and add compensation balls to it.
The Rush Smackdown finalists: Joe (4th), Allen (3rd), Jason (2nd), and Brian (1st).
Finally, sometime after 12:30 am, Danny was finished and Joseph went home. Season 15 was in the books, except for playoffs tonight. It was an eventful season and it should be an exciting finale. I hope to see you there.
After a month off to wait out the worst of the Omicron surge, league resumed play with our sixth (of eight) league night on February 8. It was time to switch banks and complete a two-bank rotation that started in December. The next pair of banks will be the two last ones for the season.
Nate playing AfM in my group. None of us really tore it up on this one.
Joseph arrived ahead of me because I was busy with work and trying to get caught up before walking over. When I came, I found a box on the table with a Bluetooth karaoke microphone in it. I asked Joseph why it was there, and he said Susan was giving to me as a gift to make it easier for me to give announcements. Trying to raise my voice to be heard has been a long-term problem for me because I have a recurring vocal cord injury caused by years of lecturing, and I’m supposed to avoid straining my voice in noisy environments. I had to experiment a bit with the microphone (it didn’t play well with my usual mask because I think it was perceiving my muffled voice as background noise and ignoring it, so I had to switch to a paper mask) but eventually I got it working. It has a bonus feature that it can use Bluetooth to play music to sing along with, but I decided to save my one-woman show of “Tommy” for a later date.
Susan playing AfM with me and Nate.
We were down a few people and had one person (Josh) play very early and one person (Danny) play very late, by prior arrangement in both cases, so it felt like a bit of a quiet night. The Tuesday Night Smackdown was on The Addams Family, and everyone underperformed during the final game, according to Joseph. (I wasn’t paying the best attention because I was also grading for my ethics classes.) Jason won the contest and the finalists (I think especially Mike) wanted to take an old-fashioned “beat ’em up” group photo as we hadn’t done in a while. Meanwhile, Bryan won the Undercard match on Junk Yard.
Lansing Pinball League, night 6 of Season 15. The Smackdown finalists have it out: Mike, Joseph, Jason, Brian.
I made an announcement at the start of the night and I’ll make it again now: March Hare Madness, the Stephen T. Kendrick Memorial Pinball Tournament, will be taking place on March 29. It will be a Critical Hit tournament, using the Critical Hit Match Play Edition deck, which is IFPA approved and allows competitors to “cast spells” with effects like forcing people to replay a game, switching group or game assignments, being allowed to shake other people’s games to give them tilt warnings, and so on. The tournament has a $10 entry fee with the proceeds going to the Rabbit and Small Animal Rescue of Westland.
Lansing Pinball League, night 6 of Season 15. Bryan won Tuesday Night Smackdown’s B division on Junk Yard.
As everyone knows (and likes to give me a hard time about), I’m notoriously terrible at writing the league night recaps except under deadline pressure. The “deadline” is that I have a strict rule to get them up before the next league night. Unfortunately, that bad habit combined with our having a six week gap between meetings due to pandemic-related cancellations, that means I end up not remembering much to write about. At least I have a few photos, right?
Josh doesn’t look entirely pleased with The Beatles.
Our last meeting on December 14 was Week 5 of the season, which began a two-week rotation of banks. We will be finishing that rotation at Week 6 tonight. The banks are the Stymphalian Birds (Attack from Mars, Jurassic Park, Star Wars, Iron Maiden, and – supposedly – Elvira’s House of Horrors) and the Apples of the Hesperides (The Beatles, Willy Wonka, Medieval Madness, Indiana Jones, and Game of Thrones. By the way, some reasoning went into the games in each bank. We were attempting to get a certain number of games designated as “long playing” spread among the banks, although at this point we really need to reconsider which games are classed as “long.” At this point the Capital City Crushers have made almost everything into a long game. Stop being so good, people! Anyway, within that constraint, I tried to assign games to the chosen mythology theme of “Labors of Hercules.” In this case, the Stymphalian Birds were a group of monstrous birds defeated by Hercules, so all the games have “flight” or “flying creatures.” It’s one of the vaguer themes, I admit. The Apples of the Hesperides were magic apples that Hercules was given a quest to steal, and which were guarded by a dragon named Ladon. The games in that bank are thus about dragons (Medieval Madness and Game of Thrones), or quests to steal magic artifacts (Indiana Jones), or forbidden foodstuffs (Willy Wonka). Oh, and of course, Apple? The Beatles? That’s the joke. Thank you, thank you.
Josh plays the A division of Tuesday Night Smackdown on Lord of the Rings.
Unfortunately, I had someone come up and ask me to rule on a situation on Elvira’s House of Horrors. Someone’s score had escalated by some extremely implausible amount in a few seconds. I confirmed with Derik that the likely cause was something misfiring and registering phantom hits and that it could not be fixed right away, so we had to pull Elvira’s. It’s really fortunate that this happened during the first week of the rotation because that makes it easier to deal with. I switched in Theatre of Magic, which had been removed from a bank due to a malfunction early in the season and had since been repaired.
Tim shows off his medal for being the Tuesday Night Smackdown champion on Lord of the Rings.
Our Tuesday Night Smackdown side tournament game was Lord of the Rings, and Tales of the Arabian Nights was drawn as an undercard. Tim (who seems to win a lot of Smackdowns) took the top honors. Meanwhile, Joseph won a particularly hard-fought Undercard which saw a lot of good scores. It seems like a lot of people in the league have gotten really good at Tales of the Arabian Nights over the years. This is fitting because it’s one of the games that has been with the league the longest.
Joseph showing off his medal (barely visible thanks to the glare) that he won in the undercard of Tuesday Night Smackdown.
That was our last league meeting of 2021 but we did have one more item of business, which was to hold Silver Balls in the City, the annual holiday-week tournament supporting the Capital Area Humane Society. Although the turnout was on the low side due to a combination of dicey weather and people having to quarantine, we still earned $186.50 for CAHS. Danny even made a donation to cover the IFPA fees so all of the entry fees could go to the charity. The .50 happened because we had a Closest to the Pin side tournament with a 50/50 pot and an entry fee of $1. The goal of the side tournament was to get the score closest to 100M on Road Show without going over. Nate T. won the side tournament. It was popular, so I think I will do it again for the next charity tournament.
Joe playing Batman ’66 during Silver Balls.
Allen playing Star Trek: TNG during Silver Balls.
There were a couple of surprise appearances for Silver Balls this year. One was Bill L., who has come to Avenue tournaments in the past but whom I haven’t seen since the pandemic hit. He made it despite scary roads, as did an even more surprising guest, Pat M. I know Pat well from playing in Detroit-area tournaments and leagues, but he had never been to the Avenue before!
Allen and Danny with their “trophies.”
Joe must know I was a Girl scout, as he is giving me the Girl Scout salute… wait, no, that’s with the hand facing the other way. I guess he’s just letting you know he came in third.
Danny won Silver Balls in the City 2022, with Allen taking second and Joe P. going home with third. The top three a souvenir Christmas ornaments with the tournament logo, which may not have been the most popular trophy I’ve given out. Joe said, “I don’t even have a Christmas tree” and Danny sardonically replied, “You want mine?”
This is the trophy I made. I used decoupage glue to attach the logo of the tournament to the back and a paint pen for the lettering.
