Lansing Pinball League

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.