Lansing Pinball League

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.)

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.

The league started Season 15 on 10/12 with a historic event. The thing I had worried about and prepared for finally happened: more than 20 people attended, meaning we could not fit all the groups on five games. This was thanks to the return of some long-absent members and the arrival of several new members. Members returning after at least a season (and in some cases several seasons) away included Tim, Jake, and Sam, those last two making a surprise appearance together. Jim and Nick, who hadn’t been active in the league since the pandemic interruption, also returned. Meanwhile we also counted several new members: Susan from Jackson (here to take up the Jackson-area champion’s mantle after we mostly lost Chris); Brian-with-an-I, who recently moved to the Capital City from Grand Rapids, not to be confused with longtime member Bryan-with-a-Y; Joe W., whom I know from the Chesterfield Pinball League; and Nate, Jake’s brother-in-law, who also came with him and Sam. I’m not sure if Nate and Sam are planning to be returning members but it seems as though Jake is. Not present was new member Michele, who played her games during a one-time-only, IFPA-calendar-shenanigans-related (don’t ask) “League Night #1 makeup night” on the following Tuesday. Even without Michele this was an unprecedented number in the time I have been running the league: 23.

I rolled out the contingency plan we had in place for this, which is to play six games and have the best five count for each player, allowing players to either play all six and take the best five, or leave after five games in their group have been completed so they can get home at a reasonable hour. (Nick and Lexi took this option and I might have if I hadn’t needed to be the one running things. Having to get up early for work on Wednesdays this semester is no fun.) I hadn’t prepared a “bonus game” in advance but threw The Walking Dead in as the sixth, as it’s relatively new to the venue and we haven’t played it as much, plus it’s Halloween month. From now on there will be a designated bonus game for each bank in case this happens again. I have tried to choose ones that loosely match the bank themes – not that bank themes make much sense to anyone outside the fantasy land of my own head.

Speaking of the banks, we are more or less replaying last season’s “Labors of Hercules” banks, with some changes made as needed for new or departed games at the venue. Night #1 is “Nemean Lion,” commemorating Hercules’s victory over the Nemean Lion. (He subsequently wore the lion’s skin around and is often depicted that way in art.) It’s one of the easiest themes to put together: the games all have “cats” in them (or tigers, or Sabertooth, or…). It happens that Tales of the Arabian Nights, despite the tiger in it, got used for a different bank but in a fortuitous occurrence, the random drawing for Tuesday Night Smackdown chose it for the night. The games that are supposed to be in the bank are The Simpsons Pinball Party, Deadpool, Theatre of Magic, Batman ’66, and KISS, but Theatre of Magic was resetting during practice games so we switched it for a game from our designated backup bank, “Cerberus,” hence we played Stranger Things in its place.

League ran predictably very long, so the last games in the Smackdown qualifying were going on late in the night. This resulted in an old-time Lansing League situation. A ball got stuck during Tim’s qualifying game on Tales of the Arabian Nights and Derik had already left, so there was no way to get the ball unstuck. I had to employ the special Lansing rules for this, meaning Tim was forced to shake his stuck ball out and get a compensation ball for the tilt, not great for a game where bonus is so important. Fortunately, his score was so good that he got top seed even without bothering to play his comp ball. Also fortunately, the ball was retrievable so we could have the Smackdown finals without picking a new game. Tim became the Smackdown champion and Bryan won the B division game on The Beatles. I still owe Bryan a medal, as I was out of the plastic medal blanks. (It turns out Michaels doesn’t sell them anymore so we will be rolling out a new model tonight.)

Hitting a historic attendance high was an auspicious beginning to a new league season, and I wonder if that is going to become the new normal or if it was a fluke. I guess we will see soon, as League Night #2 will be starting in about four hours. See you all very soon!

The league night of 9/14 was notable for two reasons: first, it was, at long last, the final qualifying night for Season 14, a season that began in January 2020; and second, it was the return of the Tuesday Night Smackdown side tournament. The Smackdown was the first official IFPA tournament that I have submitted results for since the pandemic started.

The bank was officially unnamed, consisting of just the games we had not played yet so far this season, plus three games determined by popular vote. (The Mandalorian was supposed to be in there too, but it turned out not to have arrived yet.) Due to the lack of a bank theme, I didn’t include it in the Labors of Hercules naming scheme. At the last minute, as we made up the scorecards, I decided to give the bank a name after all: The Augean Stables. For those not up on their Greek mythology, this was the labor in which Hercules had to clean out a filthy stable occupied by a herd of immortal cattle. He did so by diverting the course of a river into the stable. I said that the name was chosen because my favored game choice, The Beatles, did not make it into the bank, so it was therefore bullshit. Joseph said it was because the whole season was bullshit, though of course being Joseph he did not in fact say “bullshit.” As I explained the bank name to the league at the start of things, Joseph gestured to The Avenue’s leaking ceiling (it had been extremely rainy again) and said “there’s the river.”

The ceiling leak meant that the original Tuesday Night Smackdown random choice, Getaway, could not be used, as most of the games in that corner were turned off for safety. By the time I showed up, tired and harried, from the unfortunate Tuesday commute I have this semester, Joseph had already crossed off Getaway and then another game which had malfunctioned (I can’t remember what it was – Star Trek maybe?) and written “Fine. TMNT. It’s late.” on the score sheet.

The night’s crowd mostly consisted of the smaller group who have been attending since league restarted, with the addition of Nick. He had made a point of coming along with Lexi so that he would make the requisite four nights to qualify for finals. Unfortunately, just yesterday, Lexi realized that the two of them would be missing finals after all as they will be celebrating their anniversary. I pointed out that Joseph and I celebrated one of our anniversaries at a pinball tournament, but Lexi said they already had dinner reservations at the English Inn. Happy anniversary!

The Tuesday Night Smackdown championship was played off on TMNT between Josh, Jason, Joseph, and Mike, with the plastic medal going to Mike. The undercard (B division) included Shylia, a non-league-member making her Smackdown debut, along with Bryan, Donny, and me. When the random game draw for it was Deadpool I figured I was sunk as I had literally not played Deadpool since March 2020 if not earlier. Somehow, though, I pulled out a win. On my last ball I got two dangers for absolutely nothing, and if I had tilted at that moment it would have given the game to Donny. I know people will say “for what??” every time they get dangers on a touchy machine, but this one really was for nothing, I swear! I didn’t even nudge. At most I might have leaned against the game a little. Shylia was hit by it too, getting a tilt for a similar amount of nothing at all. “You can blame Danny for that,” said Mike of the overly tight tilt.

Tonight we will be having our playoffs for Season 14, which will determine final standings. We will also be giving out the coveted “Most Improved” and “Worst Game” awards. (I mean “worst game score of the season,” not actual “worst game,” whoever just yelled “TMNT!”)

Our second meeting of August was the penultimate qualifying night of Season 14. (Despite what Kyle Kaminski of the City Pulse thinks, penultimate means “second to last.”) It was the last official “Labor of Hercules” as the final bank would be determined by a combination of throwing in all the games that hadn’t yet been played and voting on the others. Traditionally, Hercules’s final and most difficult labor was to subdue Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guarded the underworld. (Fun fact: the Lernaean hydra, namesake of one of our earlier banks this season, was Cerberus’s sister!) The games in bank “Cerberus” were chosen because they either have vicious dogs or hellhound-like creatures in them, or because they related to Hades in some other way.

The biggest slowdown of the night was Junk Yard, with multiple groups playing very long games on it. A few people might still remember the first Silver Balls tournament in December 2015, which ran so long that we were in danger of not finishing before the bar closed. For the final game, I rigged the software to choose from only the two or three shortest-playing games we had in order to get things done as quickly as possible. The game that got drawn was Junk Yard, notorious at the time for its touchy slam tilt. Back then, it was considered a good game for someone to get 10 million on it. Times have certainly changed and now it is one of the reliably long-playing games. In my group, I felt sorry having to remind Biff to plunge off several extra balls as he was having a complete blowout of a game.

The disappointment of the night for at least some players was that Joseph’s group broke Stranger Things, and this after Joseph had put up around 100 million on Ball 1. We had to take it out of commission – I think the only time we had to do that with a game this season since Derik keeps everything playing so well – and play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles instead. Or at least some people played it. I did something while standing in front of it but I am reluctant to call it “playing.” At the end of my game I angrily declared, “I have just played the worst game in the entire history of pinball.” Mike tried to reassure me that my game was only terrible “so far” but he had missed the brutal fact that I’d just finished Ball 3. I think he just could not have imagined that someone could end a game of TMNT with 15K points. For perspective, the second worst game of the night on it was over 800K. I’m going to be very surprised if I don’t get the “Worst Score” ribbon this season. Someone else would surely have to slam tilt to make that possible.

We did not have a Tuesday Night Smackdown but we are going to be starting them again for our next league night tomorrow. The random drawing has decreed that our Smackdown game will be The Getaway. For the actual league play, we will be playing the miscellaneous bank which I have belatedly decided to call “Augean Stables.” If you want to know why I called it that, just go read up on the Labors of Hercules and you’ll probably figure it out.

August 10 was our first official return to league play since March 2020. We are continuing Season 14 which was already in progress when things got interrupted, changing our usual “long season league” into an “ultra-long season league.” Turnout was on the light side for our season re-kickoff but not too bad, all things considered. Unfortunately, the weather was hot, which combined with the new league mask requirement made for a somewhat uncomfortable time. Nevertheless, it was amazing to see people in person again, as I had not seen any league members face to face since the pandemic started.

We played bank “Apples of the Hesperides,” commemorating the time Hercules had to steal the apples of immortality from the goddesses called the Hesperides while fighting off a dragon named Ladon. It was a surprisingly quick-running night considering Game of Thrones was in the bank. My group only had to wait once for a game (and it was Game of Thrones, of course). I had a surprisingly good night considering I have barely played pinball since the pandemic. It felt like a lot of mediocre games, but sometimes consistently mediocre is all it takes.

Derik brought a ringer with him, long-time local player Allen who has not previously played in our league. I had to warn Allen that he could not qualify for finals since we were past the halfway mark for the season, but he was gracious and a good sport about it. Derik tried to petition me to change the rules but I told him rules changes have to be between seasons, not during the season. I will be asking the league if people would prefer to change the finals eligibility rule before next season.

Surprisingly absent was Danny. I had brought a box of karate medals to give him. He had given me the medals to strip off the ribbons for Tuesday Night Smackdown repurposing, but wanted the medals back when I was done. I brought them to the Zen tournament, but he forgot to take them and I had to bring them back home. Then I brought them to the league re-opener, and Danny was nowhere around. Was he trying to avoid having to take them back after all?

Tonight in an hour or so is our seventh meeting of the eight-meeting season, during which we will accompany Hercules on his quest to defeat Cerberus and enter Hades. See you soon! (Don’t forget a mask!)