Our league night on July 11 was the final night of qualifying for Season 18. As we got ready to send people to their respective banks, Ted got confused because he remembered playing bank “A” last time and we gave him an A group again this time. He pointed this out as he thought it was a mistake. Joseph started to explain that he switches which bank is “A” so people keep the same letter, but Adam cut in first to give Ted a hard time: “How many league nights have you been to now, and you don’t know how this works?” or something along those lines.
Prior to the start of league play, Joseph, Ethan, Cyndi, and I played a game on The Munsters, the Tuesday Night Smackdown game of the night. Ethan had a really great game on it that he was very pleased with (around 27 million) and then Joseph decided to crush him by completing blowing it up to the tune of around 88.
At one point during the night, I had someone come over to ask me what to do because they forgot to put a fourth player on Guns N’ Roses, then when they tried to punch one in at the last minute after player three finished ball one, it went to player one ball two, but it did now show a fourth player. When they described this I was pretty sure I knew what happened. I did not actually know this was possible, but I guessed that it would allow you to add a new player at any time rather than just during Ball One, and then would just give them three balls to play no matter what ball everyone else was on at the time. This was consistent with the strange way that extra balls work on Jersey Jack games (they add them to the end of the game rather than after the ball you earned them on). As I walked over I said “This is a weird effect of how how Jersey Jack games handle balls.” Ethan replied “I’m glad we’re discussing how to handle balls.” Anyway, it turned out I was right and it just added the player’s balls to the end of the game the same way it handles extra balls. Thanks for always confusing tournament play, Jersey Jack.
My group consisted of me, Joseph, Tim, and briefly Harpy. Harpy has played in a Lightning Flippers tournament before and asked to play in whatever we had going on. I explained that it would not be possible to qualify for finals at this point but she was OK with that so I added her to our group. Unfortunately she then had something unexpectedly come up and had to leave after only playing two games with us.
When I went to play Rush, I dialed in the song I always play (“Free Will,” the one that seems most appropriate to my academic area) and Joseph said “I knew you were going to do that.” I raised a hand behind me to give Joseph a single finger salute in reply, getting a deadpan “Wow” out of Tim.
Ethan ended up getting revenge against Joseph for crushing his Munsters game in qualifying by winning the Tuesday Night Smackdown. The B division played Avengers and somehow I managed to win that one!
After the dust settled (the “dust” being Joseph putting the scores in hastily before bedtime) Danny C. had the top qualifying position for Season 18 with a pretty healthy 27 point margin over second seed Tim. Assuming everyone attends what will be a really epic finals night, Ted was the last person to make it over the cut into A division, leaving Dan N. to be top seed in B.