Lansing Pinball League

April 9th was the seventh league night of the season and, as we have only six banks, I randomly drew from among the sixth to see which one we would be repeating. The answer was Clio, the “Cartoons” bank, which includes The Addams Family, Deadpool, Iron Man, The Simpsons Pinball Party, and South Park. Yes, that’s right. We have had to play South Park three times this season. On the up side, I did not draw Polyhymnia (the other South Park-containing bank) for our final night.

Prior to the start of the night, Joseph had a great game on The Munsters, setting the Grand Champion score as well as every one of the vanity scores (such as the various character champions). For my part, I had a quite-good game on the Smackdown game, Iron Maiden, in the process beating Joseph’s qualifying score by 2 million. Er, sorry, dear?

We had just a little bit of candy left from March Hare Madness. Needless to say, it was gone by the end of the night. No, I take it back. There were about three bird’s egg malt balls left and I ate them. What we did not have is the shirts people won in the drawing at MHM, because they arrived in the mail the day after league. Of course they did. I will bring them to league tomorrow.

Back to South Park: Mike ended up putting a high score on it, which he was suitably ashamed of. So, after years of no one breaking into the ridiculously high default score table, suddenly everyone is doing it. Mike also threatened to start putting my initials in. For those just joining us, this is a reference to Chris’s past habit of putting my initials all over Austin Powers. I think I still nearly owned the high score board on that infernal thing when it left.

Our Smackdown game was Iron Maiden. What a refreshing change of pace. Don’t worry, though; soon we’ll be back to overusing one specific game for the Smackdown. This time it will be Deadpool, which is receiving its own version of the leader board tournament from Stern. Derik won (and, prompted by me, stated his approval of the “April Showers” motif I had drawn on the medal). Lexi hadn’t competed in a Smackdown finals before, and ended up just below the cut line for the Undercard division. I went to break the bad news to her, but suddenly Joseph decided he didn’t need to play after all, so Lexi got to play. The Undercard was on Ghostbusters. No one ran away with it, but I walked a bit faster and won with something like 30 million.

Tomorrow (yeah, yeah, actually today) we will have our very last night of the regular season. At the end of the night we will know how many people can qualify for A and who is in (or at least who is guaranteed in if everyone shows up to finals). We will be meeting, as usual, at 7 pm. In the meantime, you can check your current standing in our Google spreadsheet.

It was an exciting week-plus for the league as we had League Night #6 on 3/26 followed by March Hare Madness, the Stephen T. Kendrick Memorial Pinball Tournament, on 4/2. (More on that second one in another post, I hope.) We would be playing Polyhymnia, the bank created to account for the fact that Munsters gave us our 26th game, disrupting the plan to have five banks of five. For Polyhymnia, league members got to vote on their favorite “short,” “medium,” and “long” playing games (according to the categories created prior to the start of the season to fill out the initial banks). The chosen games plus The Munsters would make up bank Polyhymnia, whose name means “many praises.” Next season, there will be a new vote, so the bank will probably change.

For some reason, enough people voted for South Park to secure it a place in the bank (partly through luck, since I had to randomly break a several-way tie). Worse, some of those demented individuals didn’t even come to the league night where the rest of us had to play it! And worst of all, the random bank I drew for Week 7 (tonight) is Clio, which also has South Park in it. Thanks, guys. The other games chosen for Polyhymnia were Attack from Mars, Indiana Jones, and Iron Maiden.

Speaking of Iron Maiden, my entire group tore up Iron Maiden, with 9-digit scores all around and me earning my first 300+ score ever. Then we all got beaten up by The Munsters. I think no one broke 100M on Ball 1. Bryan asked, “Did someone do something to offend it?”

Attendance was light, a stark contrast with the previous night’s record attendance. We were missing the Chad/Tyler combo and the Caleb/Lupe/Lexi nexus. I believe the K12 schools’ spring break had something to do with this. (College spring break is always a lot earlier.)

At one point Todd asked me why I hated South Park, having noticed all my cranky remarks about it in league Facebook posts and being relatively unfamiliar with it himself. I can’t remember what reason I gave beyond “it’s South Park,” but later in the evening Todd came up to me and declared, “I love South Park!” Apparently it treated him well. I started out bad on it and complained, but Tim said, “Doing well on South Park is a mark of shame.” Tim went on to put up over 300 million and get the first high score entry anyone in the league has ever done (the defaults are ridiculously high). Later, Joseph beat him, and ran over to me pointing at the game angrily and complaining, “Look at this! Look at this!” as though he were dismayed by doing so well on it. I ended up having a not-terrible game after all with a third ball rally. I won the video mode, and without any exaggeration, I was out of breath afterward. (Postscript: Tim went on to take the high score on the game back away from Joseph a few days later. Joseph says he would congratulate Tim, but “it means he played a lot of South Park, or at least a game of South Park.”)

On Attack from Mars, someone noticed the initials “DAS” and wondered who that is. Mike suggested that Derik had put his real initials in, rather than his standard “RED.” “Derik Allen Schimberg?” someone asked, and this set off a string of guesses: “Alex,” “Arthur,” and so on, until Mike came up with “Derik Amadeus Schimberg.”

Our Tuesday Night Smackdown game was Road Show and the undercard was Star Trek. Joseph bulldozed his way to a Smackdown championship medal. The Undercard went to Mike. It was our first time having an upstairs game in Tuesday Night Smackdown in a while, and I think people were relieved to get out of the alcove for a change. (I’m sentimental about that alcove, though. That used to be where all our games were, in the early league days.)

Tonight we’re playing bank Clio, the “cartoons and comics” bank, and will have our Tuesday Night Smackdown bout on Iron Maiden. I hope to see you all at 7 pm (or hopefully a bit earlier so you can start laying the smack down)!

The league night of March 12 was our fifth of the season, meaning that Season 12 is officially over the hill. Time to go buy some black balloons from Party City. It was also a surprisingly short night, finishing by 9:30, despite high attendance.

We played bank Calliope, themed to “adventure” (yes, it’s a vague theme). Calliope was the designated backup bank, but we hadn’t needed to switch out any games so far this season. Star Trek: The Next Generation is now in this bank, replacing Getaway, so it made its first appearance as a league game. Originally I had announced that we might not be able to play it, because it was locking balls when lock wasn’t lit and lighting locks when they shouldn’t be. Derik really wanted us to be able to use it, though, so he put in some work on it over the weekend and it was working fine by league night. Actually, I think it did have a malfunction: it was sucking balls to the outlane and refusing to let me do anything. I think Derik needs to give it a stern talking-to. There’s also the weird fact that my ST:TNG score for the night was almost exactly the same as my Game of Thrones score.

Lexi returned to the league after being away a season or so. Reports were that she had some very good games; Lupe told me, “I think she might be a natural.” Our turnout was 19 people, the most this season. If we ever crest 20 we’ll have to take some creative measures, since the league format isn’t designed to accommodate more than that (five games with four players on each one). My plan is to add a sixth game and then take each player’s best five results for the night. That way players who can’t stay for an extra long league night can leave after five games, making their sixth optional.

I had a great Lord of the Rings game (after complaining heartily about having to play it) but the rest of the night was a downhill slide, starting with a mediocre Game of Thrones and ending with bad games on everything else. Meanwhile I was trying to grade (halfheartedly) and chatting with Lupe about WPPRs, those famous “invisible Internet points.” Actually called World Pinball Player Ranking Points, they are what gives every player who has played in an IFPA sanctioned tournament or league (like ours) a world ranking. They qualify people for the state championship as well as a separate world championship (and the Women’s World Championship, which I played in back in 2017). Love them or hate them, they shape the pinball landscape, especially here in Michigan. Lupe wanted to know more about how the system works and I explained that our Smackdown tournaments are a way of raising the “value” of our league from the IFPA’s perspective, in addition to having become a popular tradition. Lupe was very eager to know where she could go to mine more points. Uh oh.

During the night I posted a poll to determine the composition of our miscellaneous bank. Now that we have 26 games we needed a new bank with our new Munsters plus four more games. The bank is called Polyhymnia (the Muse of religious poetry; her name means “many praises”) and its composition will be decided by a new poll each season. I voted for Indiana Jones, which we were about to play as part of bank Calliope, and then I wished I hadn’t because I played it awfully. I could have changed my vote but I decided to stick with it and it won a spot. I hope I don’t regret that tonight. For some reason, several sick so-and-sos voted for South Park and we’ll have to play that too. (I think one of those sadists was Lupe, who isn’t even going to be there tonight because she’s on vacation!)

We had a Smackdown game on Kiss, with the Undercard playing off on Deadpool. Danny won the Smackdown and Tim was the Undercard winner.

I’ll be seeing you all tonight at 7 pm for our sixth meeting of the season!

It’s almost time for another league meeting and that means time for me to finally post the recap for the last one. Our fourth meeting of Season 12 was the largest in recent memory, with 18 participants. (And that’s not even counting Danny, who showed up late and played his games by himself.) Despite this, we managed to keep things moving and still finished at something close to a reasonable time of night. I’m a little worried. If we end up with more than 20 people showing up at once we’re going to have an issue! Still, I must say that the growth of the league in that direction would be a great problem to have.

In addition to a good turnout by our regulars (minus Chad and Tyler), we had a surprise guest appearance by Ann Arbor residents (and AA Pinball Pete’s tournament directors) Audrey and Justin. The league also welcomed back Lexi, who played a few meetings in a past league season, and Todd, who hadn’t played in league before but made his first Lansing appearance at the Munsters launch party.

Our bank for the night was Urania, themed to “stars.” This bank contains neither Star Trek: The Next Generation nor Star Wars. Originally, the bank was Star Trek, Junk Yard, Tales of the Arabian Nights, Elvis, and Star Wars. Star Wars and Getaway left the Avenue (temporarily for Star Wars, according to Derik) and we gained Kiss and Star Trek: TNG. In order to follow the long/medium/medium-or-short/short playing game rule we’ve been using for banks, we had to slot Kiss in for Star Wars, and Star Trek: TNG went into bank Calliope (“adventure”) to replace Getaway. It still works thematically, just not quite as neatly as if Star Trek: TNG replaced Star Wars.

As I was getting ready with my paperwork and checking people in, a woman sat down at the big table upstairs and asked if it was OK that she was sitting there. Of course I didn’t need the whole table so I said it was fine. After a while her curiosity got the better of her and she asked what I was organizing. I explained that it was a pinball league, and she was delighted by this idea and began asking many, many questions about how it worked. Each answer led to another question until the next thing I knew, I was explaining the IFPA ranking system and the state championship. I learned her name was Julia, and by the time I finished talking to her, the rest of the league had clustered around and I think people were assuming she was a new league member. She said she couldn’t because she had a prior engagement for the evening, but she asked to be added to the Facebook group. I hope we’ll be seeing more of her as it’s great to find someone so enthusiastic about what we do in our little league.

In my group, Derik blew up Star Wars (getting to Kobayashi Maru early on) and had a pretty darned good run on Junk Yard too. This led to Mike, midway through his own high scoring game on JY, coming over and wanting to see Derik’s score so he knew what he needed to beat. Ultimately he did beat Derik’s score, about 54M to 41M. Mike is getting very concerned about his standing this season.

The Smackdown game, despite Tim asking if we could “pretty please” play an upstairs game this time, ended up being Medieval Madness. Blame the random number generator. I’m sure no one was thrilled given that MM has been an Undercard game already at least once this season. When we first arrived, Joseph started playing Medieval Madness and quickly discovered that the catapult wasn’t firing balls out, which spoiled a pretty good game he was having. I had actually drawn another Smackdown game when Derik walked up and I told him of the problem. I made sure he knew this was just for his information; he’s not at work during league and I wouldn’t ask him to make a fix other than getting a ball unstuck. Nevertheless, he went out to his car and came back with his tools to do a little soldering. In a short time Medieval Madness was back in action. I was glad no one noticed it was temporarily out of commission because everyone surely would have started lobbying me hard to pick a new game!

Medieval stayed in fine health throughout qualifying, and at the end of the night, Josh was the Smackdown champion. Lupe took second, which I think was her highest Smackdown finish yet. Come to think of it, my third might have been my best Smackdown game. It surely helps that Danny was too busy playing his late league games to get involved this time. Over on the Undercard, Mike took first on Scared Stiff. Joseph got second, despite his valiant attempt to win by looping the right ramp approximately 37 times. At one point he emitted a plaintive little “Help?” as he was compelled, as if by an occult hand, to shoot the loop again.

It should be noted that Audrey was actually the second highest qualifier for the Smackdown (after Derik) but had to leave before we could start the tournament. Lexi would have qualified for the Undercard, but also had left. Lupe was disappointed on her behalf. Now that I have submitted the results, Lexi is going to get her very own IFPA player number. This is her first officially submitted tournament, because when she played in the league she didn’t attend enough meetings to “count” for IFPA purposes (they require any players who did not play at least half the qualifying games for a tournament or league to be removed before official results are submitted).

Tomorrow (or today, depending on perspective) we will be having our fifth meeting, meaning we have crested the halfway point of the season. Keep in mind that members must attend four of the eight league meetings to qualify for finals, so this is the last chance for new members to join and still play in the final tournament. New players are always welcome, though, regardless of whether they are able to play in finals.