Our last league night was just two days before Thanksgiving, so I decided to make Thanksgiving-themed Tuesday Night Smackdown medals. I didn’t trust that I’d be able to do a good job drawing an actual turkey so I decided to go with a classic “hand turkey” look. Of course, the medals were too small to use a real hand for tracing. Mike asked me what American Girl doll’s hands I traced, but in fact I just set my hand down on the table to use as a model and copied it as carefully as possible.
This was the second week of our two-bank rotation, a new format first debuted the previous league night. People mostly played with the same group, with people who missed Week 3 distributed among the existing groups at random. After a week of lower attendance, we were back at a higher level, so the new format proved its usefulness. Jake, Sam, and Nate F. were back from Grand Rapids after a week off, and we had a new joiner, Nate T. Two people specifically thanked me for the new format, and no one has complained about it, so I call it a success.
With more people in attendance, we didn’t sail through the night quite as quickly as we did on Night 3, but we still kept things moving pretty well. The biggest problem was that Tron kept getting balls stuck. A few times players got it unstuck themselves, and once I got Derik to free it. I realize now that I should have removed it from contention because of this, but I randomly drew it for the B division game in Tuesday Night Smackdown and they got started playing on it. It soon did the same thing again, and Derik was gone for the night. I had to bring in “old school Lansing rules” from the days before we had Derik in the league: I told Donny to try to shake it loose and if he tilted (which he did) he would get a compensation ball. The game proceeded for a little while but then the ball got stuck again and so I ruled “catastrophic malfunction” (which is the usual ruling if there are two major malfunctions in the same game). The new game I drew was Star Trek.
The A division, meanwhile, played off on Indiana Jones. Brian was the winner and got to take home one of the coveted hand turkey medals. Joseph, though disappointed to have the Tron game scratched (as he was doing better on it than during his league game), ended up winning the new game on Star Trek. He remarked that he really likes when he gets to take one of the “special” medals back home.
Tomorrow is Week 5, so we will be starting a new two-bank rotation. It also means we are starting the second half of the season. I hope to see you there!