Lansing Pinball League

Tag: season 15

  • League Night Recap for 5/24/22

    ‘Member league night 2?

    Oh yeah, I ‘member! That was fantastic.

    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!

  • Derik and Allen Win Super-Ball XV

    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.

  • Mike defends his title again in the Season 15 playoffs

    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.

    Jen shows off her B division Smackdown medal.

  • League Night Recap for 3/8/22

    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.

  • League Night Recap for 2/22/22

    Our last league night fell on the big “Twos Day” of 2/22/22. It started the rotation between Cerberus and Augean Stables, the final two banks in the “Labors of Hercules” series.

    Danny getting a late start on Elvira’s House of Horrors after managing to get out of work early.

    Cerberus was originally themed to “hellhounds” and contained Ghostbusters, AC/DC, Stranger Things, and Junk Yard, with the last spot being reserved for whatever we hadn’t played yet in the season. It also served as the official “back up bank” for other banks, so earlier in the season, Stranger Things got switched with Theatre of Magic, and then Theatre of Magic ended up switched again with Elvira’s House of Horrors. We added in the new game Godzilla, so the bank is now Ghostbusters, AC/DC, Elvira’s, Junk Yard, and Godzilla.

    Augean Stables is the “miscellany” bank, determined by a league vote. I simplified the vote this time and just gave everyone one vote for any game that wasn’t in bank Cerberus. Not that many people voted and it resulted in a big tie among a bunch of games with one vote each, so I used a random draw to decide between them. The bank was determined to be The Beatles, Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, Batman ’66, and KISS. The random draw also chose one of the one-vote games, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to serve as the backup for both banks, “just in case.”

    Soon after I arrived, Mike discovered that water was pouring from the ceiling onto one of the games in the upstairs corner. Unfortunately, The Avenue’s roof is prone to ice dams, and when there is a big snow and then a thaw this often happens. Derik shut off all the games in that area and pulled them out from the wall, which resulted in the games looking like they were gathering together to look at Junk Yard. Allen said they were paying tribute to Junk Yard’s designer, Barry Oursler, who had just died.

    The games were pushed away from the wall due to a leak, but it looked like they were paying solemn tribute to Barry Oursler.

    I ended up in the Cerberus bank, which is good because I wore my Cerberus T-shirt. I had barely (if at all) played Ghostbusters since pre-Covid times, so unsurprisingly, that didn’t go well for me. More surprising is that Mike, who was in my group, also had a bad time with Ghostbusters. In fact, he pointed out that the two of us both had higher scores on AC/DC than Ghostbusters!

    Proof that Mike and I both scored higher on AC/DC than we did on Ghostbusters.

    At some point, someone came up to me (I forget who) and told me that there was a problem on Game of Thrones: “The flipper button broke off.” I asked, “Does Derik know?” The reply was, “I think so, he’s the one who did it.” We had a fairly low attendance night, so there were only two groups on each bank. I thought the other group had already played Game of Thrones and Derik insisted he was fine with taking his score as-is because he was on Ball 3 and was the last player, so I was going to let it stand. But then I discovered the other group had not played it yet, so we had to use the designated backup, TMNT. Mike, no fan of TMNT, was not happy about this at all. He (jokingly) said that Todd had been the one to vote for TMNT and as he was unable to make it to league night that night, his vote should be invalidated. I pointed out that if Todd came during Week 8 he still had a 50% chance of playing that bank so it was still valid and Mike conceded the point.

    Mike laying the smackdown on Guardians of the Galaxy.

    At the end of the night we had the usual Tuesday Night Smackdown on Guardians of the Galaxy, and since it was “Twos Day” I had made medals with big number 2’s on them for the winners of both divisions. Joseph chose to go second in the top group, which is what he always chooses, but it was especially appropriate. I decided to follow his lead and go second in the B division group on Batman ’66. Mike won the A division and Joseph took 2nd, which he said make him the real winner. In the B division, Allen absolutely ran away with Batman ’66, so far away that I completely gave up hope. I did, however, get 2nd, again making me the “real winner.”

    The Terrible Twos: Mike (A division Smackdown champ) and Allen (B division champ).

    In a couple of short hours it will be the final qualifying night of the season, with people switching their banks. Competition for the top seeds is still very tight. We will also be having a Tuesday Night Smackdown on the brand new game, Rush (LE). See you soon!

  • League Night Recap for 2/8/22

    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.

  • League Night Recap for 12/14/21 (plus Silver Balls)

    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.

  • League Night Recap for 11/23/21

    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.

    The “hand turkey” medals I made for Tuesday Night Smackdown.

    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.

    Lexi looking less than thrilled with whatever is happening on Tron during the B division of Tuesday Night Smackdown.

    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.

    Mike playing in the B division of Tuesday Night Smackdown.

    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.

    Brian poses with his Smackdown champion medal. Junk Yard has nothing to do with it, but there’s light here…

    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!

  • League Night Recap for 11/9/21

    November 9 was League Night #3 and it was also the start of our new league format. Due to the record number of people attending during nights #1 and #2, we have instituted a new way of playing the banks. Instead of everyone playing the same bank on the same night, we divide everyone between two banks, and then rotate on the next night so players move to the bank they didn’t play yet. This time everyone played either Bank 3, Girdle of Hippolyta, or Bank 4, Ceryneian Hind. The question immediately arose, “Will we play with the same group next time?” Since the answer was that mostly the groups would remain the same and we’d just slot in absent players randomly, things then turned to people lightheartedly razzing each other about being stuck with these jerks for two weeks.

    Todd signs the contract for his appearance money.

    Besides the new format, the other big news was that Godzilla (LE) had moved into the alcove, so I made that the Tuesday Night Smackdown game, bypassing the usual practice of drawing a game at random. We will be having a Godzilla launch party on November 30.

    Jason playing his league game on TotAN.

    League night went extremely fast. I think my league play was done by 9 pm and Tuesday Night Smackdown wrapped up by 10. This is in part due to the fact that after two bumper weeks, we had only a normal number of people (fewer than 20) show up for the night, so we could have actually run our old format. Everyone liked it anyway. It will probably be necessary at times in the future, and even when it’s not necessary it means groups have much less waiting time. I had at least two people make a point of thanking me for the new format so it is probably here to stay.

    Shylia plays in the Undercard division on Scared Stiff.

    The Smackdown on Godzilla had some very high scoring games and people who already have learned how to play it already schooled the rest of us. Allen won the A division tournament and Josh won the Undercard with a big game on Scared Stiff. The Smackdown also promoted Shylia into the status of an IFPA rated player. Congratulations, Shylia!

    Tonight is our next league night, and we will complete the bank rotation, with players who were on Girdle of Hippolyta playing Ceryneian Hind (well, I like the names) and vice versa. I hope to see you there!

  • League Night Recap for 10/26/21

    For those relatively new to the league, I have to explain a little history, which might help account for what probably seemed like a bizarre choice to cram more than two dozen people into the Avenue’s alcove at our last league night on October 26. We used to play all the games more or less in alphabetical order each season, but at some point I hit on an idea, inspired by how game banks are set up at Pinburgh. Since some games were notoriously much longer-playing than others, what if I tried to arrange the banks so that they eventually spread out the longest-playing games? We assigned each game a value of long, medium, medium/short, or short based on average scores the previous season, and then tried to have two long, two mediums, and a short game per bank. On top of that, I wanted the banks to be thematic, also a Pinburgh convention. I spent a good hour moving around little slips of paper with names of games and “S/M/L” written on them to try to get banks that both fit the vague theme of “the Muses of Greek mythology” and had an even distribution of lengths. This worked pretty well for a couple of seasons, but then we got in a lot of new games and also our sense of which games played long versus short shifted as tilts, player abilities, and other things changed. So I created the latest set of banks with a new theme, the Labors of Hercules. That’s when COVID hit mid-season.

    Joseph in his red panda kigurumi.

    One known issue with the Labors banks is that while I managed to solve the puzzle of getting games in the L/L/M/M/S format while at least paying lip service to themes, I did not observe at all where the games were located. This resulted in the Lernaean Hydra (generally themed to “snakes and dragons”) bank being almost entirely in the alcove. I got a lot of friendly complaints about that and figured I’d fix it when I next updated the banks. Meanwhile, COVID hit, interrupting our season, which brings us almost to the present.

    Joseph shows me what he’s up against on Scared Stiff. I think Player 3 was Mike, if I remember correctly. We had a lot of long-playing games.

    When we started Season 15, I was just too busy with a brutal work schedule as well as taking a class to devote time to rethinking the banks – plus, we really needed to start collecting new data for game length again. The truth is that very few of our games could reasonably be considered “short” playing anymore due to players getting better and better. So I figured to just redo the Labors of Hercules for Season 15 and worry about new banks later.

    Sam making out like a bandit on Monster Bash.

    Then the league suddenly grew. We had an all time record night for Night 2, resulting in the long-planned-for, never-used emergency bonus game rule being brought into play. Then Night 3 beat that record again. And it happened that Night 3 was the Lernean Hydra, so around 30 people ended up crammed into the alcove together. I deliberately chose a bonus game that was not in the alcove, and then it went down. We have a designated backup bank, so I took the game that was designated as the backup for the bonus game… and it was in the alcove. This is the point when being a philosopher really worked against me because one occupational hazard is a tendency to place a heavy weight on consistency in decision-making. A sane person non-philosopher would probably have just picked another game not in the alcove. Everyone had to play elbow-to-elbow all night.

    Dan talks with Lexi. I really wish I got a better picture of Lexi’s costume!

    It ended up probably the longest league night ever, with almost everyone choosing to play the sixth “optional” bonus game and then a Tuesday Night Smackdown still happening afterward. I came away from the craziness of the night with the realization that we needed to change the league format to accommodate a larger league while still retaining the traditional “five games per night” scoring. By the time I went home I had already come up with the new plan. From now on, we will alternate banks on a two-week rotation. That is, in odd-numbered weeks, half the league will play bank A and half will play bank B. Then in even-numbered weeks, people will switch banks. This will keep everything from our old format except the protracted night caused by having dozens of people all playing a single bank at the same time.

    I’m so sad this is out of focus, but this is Shylia winning her first undercard at Tuesday Night Smackdown!

    I don’t want it to sound like the night was all bad, though! We had several new players join including Jen, Leanna, Kevin, and Shylia. We also had some league members in costume for Halloween. I wore my new three-headed Cerberus kigurumi (too bad we weren’t playing bank Cerberus), Joseph was in his red panda one, and Lexi was dressed as a winged unicorn with pretty rainbow face-paint and a cool hairdo. Tuesday is also the bar’s DJ dance party night, and they were having a costume contest, but no league members won. We were all beat out by a Carmen Sandiego. (I did go to the dance floor for a little while as I waited for the epic night to roll to a close.)

    Joseph wins Tuesday Night Smackdown on Medieval Madness.

    I hope to see everyone shortly and also that our newcomers aren’t afraid to return after the Alcove Extravaganza, which I expect to be ribbed about for years to come. Derik posted in the LPL Facebook group for the first time yesterday after lurking for years. What drew him out was apparently wanting to write an LOL in response to a thread about the alcove clusterfluff. I guess I deserved that.