August 11 was our opening night of our silver Season 25! It’s like America’s 250, except something fun actually happened. This doesn’t mean 25 years, since we have had 2 seasons a year for a while and prior to that sometimes had 3 seasons a year. But the 25th season still seems like a great time to commemorate the league’s long history!
The league began in the fall of 2026 when our founder, Matt Pries, got an idea. He saw that The Avenue Cafe, which was at that time still operating as a combination cafe and bar, had brought four pinball machines into their back room: Johnny Mnemonic, Indiana Jones, Medieval Madness, and Lord of the Rings. Since he was a pinhead and lived nearby, he wanted them to keep those games there and maybe even get a few more. He reasoned that if he organized a league, the games would get a lot of coin drop, and that would convince The Avenue and Pete’s that they were a good financial investment. Matt went around putting up flyers for the league and one of them was at Pinball Pete’s in Ann Arbor. One fateful day in early November, I had gone to Ann Arbor to celebrate my birthday, and we went into Pete’s. I saw the flyer and was started to realize that it was actually for a league very close to my house in Lansing. I knew that Joseph was into pinball and hadn’t met many people in Michigan yet, so I said, “We should join that pinball league.” We were there at the league’s second meeting and have been members ever since.
Eventually Matt stepped down from league director to focus on his studies (he had gone back to grad school) so he passed the league directorship to me, and then a while after that he moved to take a job. I really miss the energy Matt brought to the league and we certainly can thank him for the existence of 40+ games at The Avenue today. It started as a scheme to make sure he had some good pinball to play near his house, and it developed into something that has brought joy and friendships to many people. Plus, The Avenue is now the premiere mid-Michigan pinball location. In the pinball world, The Avenue is truly “The House That Matt Built.”
While we have changed a few things in the format and rules over the years, our league meetings continue a couple of idiosyncratic traditions from Season 1, one being the “drawing from a hat” phase of allocating groups (this didn’t take quite so long when our league had about 8 people most nights!) and the quirk of “Lansing Extra Balls,” meaning we compromise between leagues that allow no extra balls (most of them) and those that allow all extra balls by allowing one and one only. It allows newer players the excitement of earning extra balls without keeping everyone all night as the master players play ball after ball.
We had several new players join so far this season: Dale K., John M., Jen K., and Mark L. Kathy E. has also graduated into a full player after playing as a guest player for the second half of last season. Mark C. also returned after a season away, and everyone was glad to have him back, even if it means we’re going to be distinguishing which Mark we’re talking about from now on. That’s fine; we’re already used to doing it with Brian/Bryan.
We once again have a new bank theme. The last couple of times we’ve redone the banks it has been done entirely by location, with the names just retrofitted onto them based on some slight basis I can point to if pressed. This is as opposed to past seasons when we tried to allocate games in banks either to make sure there was at least one 90s game in each bank, or to supposedly balance long- and short-playing games (they’re all long-playing now). I also used to try harder to put games together that had a shared theme and that eventually got too difficult and we decided spacing everyone out while playing was the most practical way to arrange the banks. So this season I arbitrarily chose my favorite book of all time, Watership Down, and assigned characters to the banks based on any slight connection I could find with any game in the bank. You can try to guess my reasoning, if you know the book or movie or TV show or other TV show.
The first night we played banks 1 and 2, and everyone will rotate to the one they haven’t played yet tonight. The banks were named Woundwort, for the terrifying central antagonist of the book, and Hazel, the most prominent female character, whom we first meet trying and failing to reason with Woundwort.
The only difficulties we had on this league night was a sticking button on Dungeons and Dragons, which we failed to fix with our usual home remedy of Joseph rubbing some hand sanitizer around it. Derik got tired of our ineptitude and went and popped it off and cleaned it properly, after which there was no problem.
The Smackdown game was our newest game Transformers. Smackdowns are normally chosen randomly, but the exception is that we always honor a new game by making it the first Smackdown. The B division played Godzilla. Derik won the championship and Tim took the undercard win. The B division game lasted so much longer than the A division game that everyone had wondered off and left by the time I had finished my own ball on Godzilla and I had to chase people down on Messenger to find out how everyone finished. As a result, I have only a winner photo for Tim, since Derik had left. His loss!
I’ll be seeing you again very shortly! Don’t forget to check in with me, especially if you’re new as I might not know your face yet.
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