Welcome to the Capital Combo, a blog of the Lansing Pinball League. Anything posted here can be blamed solely on the post’s author – usually Heather. It does not represent the official position (or sense of humor) of the League.
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When the league last met, we started our final bank rotation between 7 (Canis Minor, “The Little Dog”) and 8 (Coma Berenices, “Berenice’s Hair”). Bank 7 is our designated back-up bank that games move into and out of based on need. Bank 8 is our “everything else” bank, made up of anything we haven’t played yet plus games chosen by popular vote. There had been an unusual number of mid-rotation game switches this season as well as several new games, so this time the two banks were overcrowded. We had several games that had been played by only half the league. I decided to put together the two banks with all the games that no one had played yet plus as many of the “half-played” games as possible. I put it to a vote to decide which of the candidate games would not be played. As usual, the voter turnout was not very high, but the most popular (by which I mean least popular) choice was Monster Bash (philistines) followed by a tie between Ghostbusters and Stranger Things. I did a random drawing between them and the unlucky loser was Ghostbusters.
Devon playing in the Metallica Smackdown.
At some point, Danny walked up to me with a deadpan look on his face and something in his hand. I looked at what he was holding out and realized it was a flipper button. He had evidently decided to turn up The Addams Family and rip off the knob. Earlier this season the same thing happened to him on Indy. Derik asked me if there was time to fix it and I said sure and he got it sorted out for us. Thanks, Derik!
Derik’s AC/DC Smackdown B division win, in progress.
Our Tuesday Night Smackdown was on Metallica, and the random drawing for the undercard division selected AC/DC. Danny triumphed over Devon, Joseph, and Peter in the A division, and in the B division Derik beat Tim, me, and Bryan. I guess I should have shot the ramps.
With one league night left to go in qualifying, we currently have 22 players qualified for finals, with five more who will qualify if they attend the last session. Since this season we are going to limit A division to 8 people in order to keep the tournament shorter, the competition to get above the cut is extremely fierce, and the margin very narrow. Peter is currently one point ahead of Devon in 8th and 9th and sadly for me, I am another 4 points behind Devon in 10th. Peter keeps wanting to point out how close the three of us are and Joseph keeps trying to discourage him from reminding me. The gap between any of us and Jason in 7th is large, so it is unlikely (though not impossible) that anyone will overtake him. It’s really looking like this will be my first B division season in quite a while. I have usually hung around the 9th or 10th place mark which used to be the bottom of A. At least I’ll have a chance at hardware in B.
Devon turns away from Metallica, annoyed.
Meanwhile in A, Danny has a fairly good lead (22 points) over Tim but Tim only has one point on Josh. That said, the A division seeding isn’t quite as important now that there will be no byes. The A/B cutline is really where the suspense is this season.
That’s the wrap-up for last time and you know what that means: it’s almost time for the next meeting, in just a few hours. (I haven’t forgotten that I still owe you all an Ethan Tournament recap, but work and Pinball at the Zoo have been eating my spare hours recently.)
The usual suspects. (Smackdown champion Danny and undercard winner Derik.)
The annual Stephen T. Kendrick Memorial Pinball Tournament, held in memory of my rabbit Stephen who died in 2016, returned to The Avenue on March 18. This tournament benefits RASA Rescue (Rabbit and Small Animal Rescue) of Westland, the rescue from which I adopted Stephen in 2007. In recent years this tournament has used a timed matchplay format with a Critical Hit deck. This deck, which for some strange reason is IFPA-legal, allows shenanigans such as putting tilt warnings on someone else’s game, forcing someone to switch scores with you mid-game, and shuffling players between groups.
Devon plays Getaway in finals.
Devon reacts to a drain.
Last year a half dozen of my Critical Hit cards were found to be missing at the end of the tournament, and despite appeals and searches, they never turned up. At the time the deck was out of print and impossible to obtain. This year, however, a new printing has finally come out, and I bought a second deck to combine with my original for more cards. The author recommends a deck for every 20 people or so and with only 12 players this year it was more cards than necessary, but it’s always better to have too many than too few.
Joseph and Peter provide commentary for the stream.
Joseph had an idea for a new rule to allow more cards to be passed out and hopefully encourage more card use earlier in the tournament. In the past we have often found that people hoard cards for the first few rounds and then never get around to using all of them by the end. This time we gave out cards not just for each extra ball earned as usual, but also for coming in last in a round. This new rule proved popular and did encourage players to use cards earlier and more freely.
Danny gives KISS his game face.
With twelve players, we played three groups of four every round, and what kept happening was people using cards to avoid being in a group with Danny. In one of the first rounds I used a “move player to a random other group” card to get Danny out of my group, but it was a tough group overall and I didn’t really want to play anyone in it. The next time that card came up, someone pointed out that it doesn’t say the random player has to be a random other player, and used it to move themselves out of a group. I realized that’s what I should have done earlier. Lesson learned. Another popular card was one that makes your group cover the game’s display, and since Derik ended up being dealt a lot of them, he used it several rounds running.
Another dismayed reaction from Devon on KISS.
In the last qualifying round, I was playing Stephanie, Greg, and Linda on Monster Bash, and I was very nervous. I was working on setting up the usual modes-into-multiball but I knew that Stephanie was holding one of the most powerful cards, the one that forces someone to take their hands off the flippers and drain their ball as soon as the card is played (and then they get a compensation ball afterward). Stephanie had shown it to me and asked me to explain it to her, and I told her how it worked and gave an example of using it to stop someone from playing multiball. So, as I got ready to start multiball on Ball 3, I was just waiting for Stephanie to throw that card down on the glass. I braced myself but to my surprise it didn’t happen, and I pulled into second (Linda won the match). Instead, she threw it down on Greg as he started his multiball, in order to get herself into third place instead of fourth. She just didn’t want to finish out the tournament with a last and figured Greg was a better target.
How are things going for Tim?
… Oh.
I had bought three resin rabbits to use for trophy toppers, two golds and a silver, and painted one of the gold ones with bronze paint so they would be Olympic medal colors. Only afterward did I remember that I always try to give four trophies for tournaments with a four-player finals. I was so busy I almost skipped doing it, but then I thought, “If I make finals I just know I’ll get fourth and I don’t want to be the one with no trophy.” I ended up having to make a very tiny and ad hoc trophy with a small plastic rabbit I had left over from some past set of trophies perched on top. The first through third place trophies were big and grand, and the fourth looked like the booby prize. I had a premonition that I was going to end up getting it.
Danny faces Godzilla in the final confrontation.
The four qualifiers were Danny, me, Devon, and Tim. Danny was top seed and got to choose a bank. I had created three banks, each of which had one modern Stern game, one Stern DMD game, and one Williams game. Danny grumbled, “All these banks suck,” and I pointed out that I had done him a favor and put Godzilla in one of them. Unsurprisingly, that’s the one he chose. The other two games were Getaway and KISS.
Devon anxiously watches Danny play Godzilla in the finale.
Possibly the most dramatic moment happened in the first game on Getaway. Tim played Trollololo, a card that allows a player to shake another player’s game before they plunge, in an attempt to give them tilt warnings. If they tilt instead, the affected player gets a compensation ball and a random card from the tilter’s hand. Tim played it against Danny, and appeared to neatly put two tilt warnings on the game, but then the ball plunged into play. The question was, should this be a disqualification, as though Tim had played out of turn? I delegated ruling to Joseph since I was in the match. Because the match was streaming, he was able to go to the tape, so to speak. Peter brought up the video of the incident and on careful study Joseph could see that Tim had not touched the shifter and therefore the ball plunging was the game’s error, not Tim’s. Joseph ruled that since the card permitted Tim to touch the game, but they hadn’t touched the plunger, it couldn’t be seen as player error. He ruled compensation ball for Danny but no disqualification and also Tim did not have to surrender a card as there was no tilt. When it was Tim’s turn, Danny retaliated by also playing Trollololo, walking up, and intentionally tilting. This is something I have seen players do before and I think the card’s author perhaps did not consider that the penalty of surrending a card in your hand for tilting is not high enough to stop people from strategically taking an intentional foul. The game ended with a first for Devon, a second for Danny, a third for me, and in a shocking upset, a last for Tim on one of their strongest games.
In the next round on KISS, Tim recovered with a first, I got second, Danny got third, and Devon got fourth. That meant that going into finals, the scores were Danny and me with three points each, and Tim and Devon with four each. With a near tie, it was anyone’s tournament, except for the fact that the last game was on Godzilla, a Danny stronghold. On Ball 1, no one did much and the scores were very low, but at least I had started setting some things up. Devon then played Bomba, a card that nullifies the current game after Ball 1 and causes a restart. After the restart, there was another low-scoring Ball 1, and Devon played a card that forces someone to switch players with you after the first ball. He played it against me as I had the highest of the group of low scores, so I felt like I had gotten disadvantaged twice this round. Ultimately, Danny got first, Tim got second, Devon got third, and I got fourth. The final scores were Danny 7, Tim 6, Devon 5, and Heather 3. Reader, I took home that afterthought of a fourth place trophy just as my intuition told me I would. Devon was very pleased with his trophy, as it was his first trophy in a tournament outside of league finals.
I asked Joseph to take this photo of Tim (2nd), Danny (1st), Devon (3rd) and me (4th). Somehow Joseph did not think to let me know that the ears were askew on my bunny-eared hood that I had worn for the occasion..
The tournament was a lot of fun as always and, most importantly, it raised $228 for RASA Rescue, which will be used to support their mission of fostering pet rodents and rabbits, many of whom have special medical needs. Thanks to all the player and other donors, including Pinball Pete’s.
This article was edited on 4/9/25 to include more detail on the final match, particularly the way cards were used.
Peter plays his B division Smackdown finals game on Getaway.
On March 25 we played our sixth league night of Season 22, wrapping up the bank rotation between Bank 5, “Argo Navis,” and Bank 6, “Cetus.” As I arrived, Devon told me he had been waiting for a recap of March Hare Madness and was disappointed not to see one. I actually felt really bad about this. I had just barely had enough time to write the previous league night’s recap but had not been able to pound out the MHM recap yet. I reassured him that I was still planning to write it. When I gave the night’s announcements, I thanked everyone for coming to March Hare Madness and commented that Devon was disappointed I hadn’t written the recap yet but that I hoped to get to it soon. Later, Devon came up to me and gave me a hard time for busting his chops about asking for a recap. I explained that I legitimately had not intended to come off as saying “Well Devon here complained about not getting a recap, what a whiner,” but instead was trying to be apologetic as I legitimately felt bad about it! Anyway, that’s the kind of misunderstanding that happens when your relationship is mostly built on trash talking. More on that later. As of this writing I still have not recapped MHM.
Devon and Dan watch and wait to play their balls on Pulp Fiction in the Smackdown finals.
In Bank 6, we had to substitute John Wick for Stranger Things, the latest in an unfortunate series of mid-rotation substitutions we have had to make this season. It’s been unlucky that way and while we have a way to deal with it in the league scoring, it’s not ideal. Bank 5 fortunately stayed intact and we will play both John Wick and Stranger Things in Bank 8 so everyone will still get to play them at least once (fingers crossed).
Danny took the top score on both Bank 6 and 7, and is also number one in the overall standings. In second place is Tim, and in third is Josh, as we head into the final bank rotation.
Tim plays Pulp Fiction on stream in the Smackdown finals.
Our Smackdown game was the new addition Pulp Fiction, and Peter streamed it for us as he has been doing lately. During the finals, Devon commented that it was a “D heavy finals” since Dan, Derik, and Devon were all playing. I said, “Well, that’s only three people” and he said “three out of four!” I gestured at the B division game on Getaway that I was part of and said, “Excuse me, eight.” He replied, “Oh, well, I’m sure your little B division is very fun…” in the most condescending voice he could summon and I replied with something I will not write in this blog as Joseph would disapprove.
Smackdown undercard winner Peter and champion Derik.
Tonight we will be starting the final rotation of the season, with games that have either not made it into play yet or that have been switched out for backups earlier in the season. See you all soon!
Our last league meeting started the second half of the season and a rotation between banks 5 (Argo Navis, “The Ship Argo”) and 6 (Cetus, “The Sea Monster”). An interesting fact about Argo Navis is that it depicts a ship and yet appears to rotate around the pole backwards. What the ancients made of this, I don’t know. Often such oddities are reflected in their myths about the stars, but I don’t know of any myth that involves the Argo moving in reverse. Maybe Poseidon backhanded the orbit shot.
Devon plays KISS while my travel mug hangs out in the foreground. Yes, that’s Bam from Animal Crossing.
Week 5 is officially the last week new players can join except as guest players, although I don’t believe we had any new joiners at the last minute. Erin made it out again, though, which is great. She thinks she might manage to make enough nights this season to play finals, but work makes it very iffy. Mike Stewart has let me know that he will not be playing the rest of the season, unfortunately, due to needing to budget gas money and other stuff competing for his attention. Mike is one of the league long-timers so I’m hoping he’ll be able to rejoin us next season.
Tim plays the B division Smackdown game on Elvira’s House of Horrors.
Joseph and I were recently talking about how the scores on Medieval Madness just never seem to have reached the averages players used to get on our previous MM that we had when the league was new. The first half results on MM are consistent with that observation: Dan N. was the only person to score over 15 million with 38.7, and the median was 6.8.
Devon took this photo of me playing in the Smackdown finals. I like how you can see me in the monitor also.
Danny plays the decisive Smackdown game on Dungeons & Dragons.
Our Tuesday Night Smackdown game was on our newest game, Dungeons & Dragons, and the B division played off on Elvira’s House of Horrors. Danny won the A division and Tim was the champion of B.
Tonight is, of course, our next league night. We’ll finish the bank rotation and play our brand new Pulp Fiction as the Tuesday Night Smackdown game. I hope to see everyone soon!
Tim and Danny celebrate B and A division wins in the Smackdown, respectively.
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On our last league night, we finished banks 3 and 4 and the first half of the season. It was our first league night without Ethan, which made it a hard one for many league members. People kept commenting on how quiet the night was.
Mark and Nathan chatting as I blast them in the face with a flash. Lexi points out that direct flash is very on trend right now, so there.
We had another technical mishap as the flipper decided to fall off Indiana Jones mid-game. Joseph put up a sign saying “Indy has chosen poorly, go play Monster Bash” which was the chosen backup game. Since half the league had already played Indy, what happens is that we end up with two score tracks: there are two 100s, two 99s, etc., as people are only ranked against people who played the same game they did. It screws up the scoring for the season a bit but it’s better than making everyone replay a game from a past league night.
Peter and Dar are hard at work mining points, while Dar takes a break.
With the bank 3/bank 4 rotation now complete, we can say that Tim is the leader on 3 (Corvus) and Josh has bested 4 (Perseus). The overall winner at the end of the first half of the season is Danny C., with Tim one solitary point behind, and Josh 5 points behind Tim in 3rd place. The cutline for A division is below 8th place (a new rule this season), and right now Joseph and Mike are tied for 7th, leaving this reporter trailing 14 points behind them in 9th. I am regretting changing the rules to make finals shorter.
Tim plays in the A division of the Smackdown while Scott plays in B.
Our Tuesday Night Smackdown was on Medieval Madness, chosen because it was one of Ethan’s favorite games. Shortly after Ethan died, a sign reading “ERR RIP” went up on Medieval Madness (ERR was Ethan’s high score entry). Jason also has suggested that anyone achieving a high score in March should enter ERR. Jason ended up winning the Smackdown game. Meanwhile, the B division played out on Ghostbusters. This was Scott’s first time playing Smackdown finals. He had actually qualified in the past, but didn’t realize he was supposed to stick around for the playoff at the end of the night. Joseph won the B division game on Ghostbusters.
Jason and Joseph, the Smackdown winners of the night, gesture at Ethan’s high score initials.
We’re about to start another league night, which will open the second half of the season and provide the last chance for new players to join this season. After the 5th night, new players can only play as guests. If you’re thinking of joining, right now is the time! See you all soon!
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It’s sad to write the league night recap this time since it marks the last league night that Ethan played. We lost Ethan unexpectedly last week. I was hoping to feature photos of him in this recap, but then I discovered that it was one of those nights when I got distracted and didn’t start taking photos until near the end of the night, and his only appearance is half of his back. I’m very sorry for that. As it happens, Ethan’s last league night was a very good one for him, as he finished second so far on Bank 4 (Perseus).
New player Greg and old hand Brian, hard at work in the pinball mines.
We had a last and a first on the same night, as so often happens in life. While it was Ethan’s last league night, it was also the first league night for our new member Greg. Greg is new to competition play but not to pinball. Coincidentally, I ran into Greg again not long later at RLM Amusements in Grand Rapids during their Dungeons and Dragons launch party. We didn’t get to play together either time, though. We also have had a temporary departure as Christy is going to be living in Minnesota for a couple of months due to her husband’s work, but she expects to make it back to the league in April in time to qualify for finals.
Christy thought I should be in one of the photos for a change, so she asked me to do a Charlie’s Angels pose with her. Joseph took the photo. Unfortunately the accidental capture of half of Ethan’s back as he plays John Wick in the Smackdown B division finals is my only Ethan photo of the night.
Peter set up streaming on Game of Thrones, giving the people who played bank Corvus that night a chance to be on the stream. Corvus is one of the banks that still retains a fair bit of its “theme.” Corvus is the Crow, so the games mostly have birds in them, with the exception of Attack from Mars which got square-pegged into the bank on the basis that it has flying saucers. Perseus is supposed to be a “heroes and adventure” bank, although I can’t remember how AC/DC ended up in it. I probably just couldn’t figure out where else to put it.
Devon plays in the Smackdown tournament.
Attack from Mars was, for some reason, playing ridiculously tough for people. I don’t think there’s anything I can objectively identify that was different about it, but the scores were remarkably low. I beat the rest of my group with a score of 943M and that score put me above the night’s median for the entire league!
Smackdown undercard winner Joseph and main champ Tim.
Our Tuesday Night Smackdown game was Uncanny X-Men, and the B division played on John Wick. Tim won the A division tournament and Joseph won the B division.
That’s it for yet another recap. See you all shortly. It will be a strangely quiet night without Ethan, but we’ll have each other’s company as consolation.
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By now, most of already heard the news that league member Ethan Reynolds died unexpectedly last Tuesday. Below, I am reproducing the announcement of this that I posted in the league Facebook group when I learned about it on Wednesday.
I am terribly sad to have to report that league member Ethan Reynolds passed away yesterday, suddenly and unexpectedly. […] As I am sure is also true for all of you, I was stunned to hear this news. It is incomprehensible to think of someone so vibrant being suddenly gone from the world. Although I did not know Ethan well on a personal basis, I did know him as an indispensable part of the camaraderie of our league. He quickly became one of the core members, the people who make up the league’s personality. He also contributed considerably to the growth of the league in recent years by bringing in friends, and he often recruited people to play in the charity tournaments too, sometimes people who just happened to be at the bar that day! His outgoing nature was legendary to the extent that his name became synonymous with courageous extroversion. If I didn’t have enough people for one of my tournaments, someone might say, “If only we had Ethan here to do his thing” or “We need someone to be an Ethan and go talk to that person playing Medieval Madness.” […]
I am so sorry to lose Ethan and his joyful, fun, and welcoming presence from the LPL, but I know he will never be forgotten by the membership.
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The Ethan Reynolds Memorial Charity Tournament will be held at The Avenue Cafe in Lansing on April 1 at 6:30 pm to celebrate our recently departed member Ethan. The tournament will be “pay what you wish,” with $1 being the minimum to cover IFPA fees, and anything past that being a donation to the Capital Area Humane Society, Ethan’s preferred charity. There will be prize giveaways and trophies for the top three.
The format will be a seven-strikes group strikes format using “fair strikes.” That means that in a four-player group strikes will be 0/1/1/2, in a three-player group 0/1/2, and in a two-player group 0/2.
Come have fun with us – Ethan would have wanted all of us to have a blast!
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We had our second league night of the season on January 28, which finished our bank rotation between the first two banks (known to me and Joseph and probably no one else as “Ophiuchus” and “Lepus”). Due to an issue with Batman ’66, we had to switch in Ghostbusters for a backup game, which I don’t think very many people were excited about. When a game switch happens midway through a rotation, we don’t have the people who played the bank during the previous league night replay, since that would be impractical. Instead, we have two separate rankings on the games, each with their own 100/99/98 scores. This does result in the weirdness that for that given night the number of total points is inflated since there are two 100s, two 99s, etc., but I decided it was the least bad way to deal with it.
Two Peters for the price of one: now that’s a Value Price!
The league seems to be growing again as we had more new new players: Darien (Linda’s neighbor, if I’ve got this right), who has played pinball a long time but never in competition; Luc, whom I didn’t get to talk to very much yet; and mother-daughter combo Kim and Payton. Some of the new players were curious about Peter’s streaming rig, which made another appearance tonight, and I was excited to explain to them that people stream pinball on Twitch.
Devon is presumably giving his usual helpful advice to Joseph, like “you should shoot that ramp that you keep missing” and “maybe don’t drain.”
Our Tuesday Night Smackdown game was on Godzilla, so Peter set the streaming rig up on that. The B division was on Monster Bash. Smackdown champion Jason asked if he could wear what he called my “bunny hat” for the photo, meaning the hat that we draw numbers out of for bank assignments at the start of each league night, a tradition dating back to the Matt days. I said sure, but it’s a deer hat, to which he responded that he just assumed it would be a bunny since it was mine. I do own multiple bunny hats (as well as a bunny hoodie and a bunny-hooded cape) but, as I explained, the hat was actually an impulse buy at a gas station somewhere up north many years ago. It was either in Grayling or Gaylord, I forget which – somewhere it made sense to be selling a deer camp souvenir. I managed to prevail in the B division on Monster Bash to join my hat in the photo.
Jason assesses the situation as he steps up to play in Smackdown finals.
Jason wears my deer hat to celebrate being the Smackdown champion and I give a thumbs up for winning B division.
After the first two weeks, the standings aren’t meaningful yet (since everyone drops the two lowest nights), but the final scores for the bank rotation are complete, at least. Right now our champ on Bank 1, Ophiuchus (“the Snake Bearer”), is Danny. Second place belongs to Josh and third to Tim. The winner of Bank 2, Lepus (“The Hare”), is also Danny, but this time Tim has second and Derik has third.
We’re less than a day away from our next league meeting. Peter will surely bring his rig again and we’ll have the usual fun with our Smackdown side tournament, so come early to put some games in! See you all soon!
Posted inRecaps|Taggedrecap, season 22|Comments Off on League Night Recap for 1/28/25
