Lansing Pinball League

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!)