Lansing Pinball League

The Capital Crushers descended on The Avenue Cafe on March 28 to kick off the eighteenth – you read that right – season of the Lansing Pinball League. It was our best-attended night in a long time as 25 people played, necessitating the addition of a second bank. This was mainly due to a sudden influx of enthusiastic new players who brought great energy with them: Ethan, Cyndi, Jon, Adam, Ann-Marie, Grant, Randall, Ro, and Ted. We did our usual drawing from a hat but fortunately avoided having a group entirely made up of new players (barely, since Joseph ended up steering a group of three newcomers). We also had the reappearance of a couple of off-and-on regulars who weren’t able to make it last season, Jason “Mags,” Shylia, and Brian K.

I was in a group with Cyndi, who is very new to pinball, and after making sure she was OK with receiving advice, I showed her how to make the Tower skill shot on Lord of the Rings and then immediately shoot the ring to start a mode. I was thrilled and proud when she proceeded to execute both elements perfectly on her first try, because at heart I’m a teacher even when I’m not at school. Cyndi, Linda, Josh, and I made for a fun and collegial group.

Our Tuesday Night Smackdown on Indiana Jones had the most players I can remember, possibly a record turnout, meaning that not everyone qualified to play finals. Several people near the bubble hung around watching anxiously as the last games were played. The final game as I rung the bell to end qualifying ended up catapulting both Cyndi and Linda into qualifying and sadly sending Jason and Jon home.

I have a button maker now, and finally got around to making a template for giving out buttons to Smackdown winners which they can wear for bragging rights. Tim put theirs on right away and Joseph… well, for some unaccountable reason he decided to do something silly with his. Who would have guessed?

I hope to see you all shortly at our second league night (and don’t forget about the ladies’ Lightning Flippers event next week)!

The last day of February was also the last night for the regular league season. The final seeds for the playoffs, and even more importantly who would make it into A division, was decided on this night. It promised to be a long night since some people needed to make up Star Trek (it had been taken out for phantom scoring the previous league night) and everyone would have to play the same bank, since we started the last two-bank rotation on an even-numbered night.

Surprisingly, even though we did have four groups playing the same bank for the first time in a while, it didn’t end up being too long. A total of 16 people played, two of them (Biff and Danny) being latecomers who went around on their own after league was mostly over. There were a couple of backups, but it wasn’t the really late night I was bracing myself for. One notable absence was Jake. He and Sam usually come together from Grand Rapids, but Sam came on his own. According to Sam, Jake said he would be in B division no matter what transpired so he might as well just see us at finals. I asked him if that meant that he loved us more than Jake did, since we aren’t good enough for Jake to just hang out with if A division isn’t on the table. He started saying something about Jake having a family. Pffft, excuses, excuses.

Also missing was reigning league champion Mike, who was feeling under the weather. He missed three nights this season and still managed to make A division, though he will surely miss having a first-round bye this time. Those will go to #1 seed Derik and #2 seed Danny.

Probably the biggest heartbreak when the dust settled was that Nate missed A division by 1 point. On the other hand, one could equally say that the happiest story of the night was that Biff made A division by 1 point. It reminds me of one of my favorite Peanuts comics. It turns out, though, that Sam is probably going to miss league finals, which will move Nate up into A division after all. I’m sure Nate is very happy that Sam is sick! Wait, that doesn’t sound right…

Our Tuesday Night Smackdown game was on TRON. It was one of our least popular Smackdowns, with only six people entering scores. Mark played his first Smackdown A division finals against Tim, me, and Joseph. Unsurprisingly, Tim won, although I had a good shot at it and ended in 2nd. Bryan and Linda played off for the B division on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, with the victory going to Bryan. I don’t know why the dice roll always picks TMNT when we’re doing a Smackdown at the top of the stairs.

That concludes Season 17 except for finals tomorrow, and Super-Ball XVII (Zen Night), which will be in a week. In 24 hours we… actually won’t know yet who won Season 17, I am going to bet. But at least we’ll be getting close. I hope.

Our first meeting of 2023 on 1/10 was our sixth of the season and we ended up having a big enough crowd to need to split into two banks. Unfortunately, this does mean that league night #8 will have to be one bank no matter how big of a crowd we have, but we’ll make do.

Unfortunately, The Addams Family kept having issues, most critically resetting, so it had to be taken out of commission after almost everyone in one bank had played it already. Josh was looking over my shoulder as I was checking on the upcoming banks to find a backup game and pointed out that something was wrong with them as Bank 8 was purported to contain South Park and FunHouse, which obviously we don’t have. I briefly panicked, thinking that I had accidentally given out the editor link in order for some prankster to do that (putting in one of my least favorite games and my very favorite game), then realized that Joseph had done it for a placeholder because Bank 8 has two empty spaces until we vote on what to put in it.

We had a visit from Kristen G., who played in the league years ago before moving away, and was in town for work. She didn’t play in league (there’s really no point in playing one night) but she did play in the Tuesday Night Smackdown game on 007 and got second place. This must have been her first official tournament at The Avenue in quite a while. Allen also played in the A division of the Smackdown, getting fourth. Sadly, this will be his last official appearance at the Avenue for some time.

Although this wasn’t known yet at the time, it turns out that the night marked Allen’s exit from the league. Over state finals weekend he let me know that his work in Michigan has unexpectedly ended early, allowing him to return back home to Texas and get to live with his family again. Previously his plan was to move back in May. While I recognize that this is good news for him, I was very sad to learn that he wouldn’t be able to finish the league season after all. State finals served as his last big hurrah as a Michigan player (for now), and he went out with style by taking 3rd place. He wanted me to let everyone in the league know how much it has meant to him to have a second family in Michigan, which is what made it bearable for him to stay away from his first family so long.

The night ended with Tuesday Night Smackdown as usual, and as mentioned, the A division played on our newest game, 007. I somehow failed to take any pictures of the winners this time, probably in part because my usual league camera (“Little Points”) had just gone out of commission. Mike won on 007 and in the B division, I had a really wild come from behind on ball 3, player 4 of Game of Thrones for the win. I started the last ball with fewer than a million points, needed to get past 300 million some, and finished well over 400 million thanks to one good multiball.

It’s been a while since our last league night because we took December 29 off to play the annual Silver Balls in the City charity strikes tournament. Unfortunately, I didn’t take notes about the night like I sometimes try to do (it helps with my unfortunate habit of writing up the recap two weeks later) and my brain has subsequently been churned repeatedly by a record grading marathon, then the holidays, then scrambling to prepare a new semester. Frankly, it’s amazing I can remember my own name. Fortunately, I do have pictures for you this time, and I can remember a few highlights, so here goes.

Our last league night on December 13th was the fifth of Season 17. We had a relatively small turnout again last time so we played only one bank, “Athena.” I was considering playing two banks no matter what on the assumption that at some point we’ll need to again and so we won’t want to end up with an odd number of banks left. Joseph convinced me I should stick with the rule about playing one bank with fewer than 16 people so that’s what we did. We were missing regulars Pat, Brian, Mike (who let me know he was out sick), and Allen (who was back home in Texas for the holidays). On the other hand, we had the surprise return of Nate F., Jake’s brother-in-law, who hadn’t played this season. Nate walked up to me, gave me a hearty pat on the shoulder and said it was good to see me again, and I was so embarrassed because I felt I had to own up and admit I could not remember who he was. Fortunately he took it in good humor.

Dan asked me what Jurassic Park had to do with the bank theme of “Athena.” I responded “It needed to go somewhere and I couldn’t make everything fit.” I did point out that I was proud of including Rush in the bank because Athena’s symbol was an owl. I realized later that I had forgottne that I did have a reason to put Jurassic Park in Athena. It’s because Athena was the goddess of wisdom, that is, she was a clever girl. (Cactus Canyon is really the one I have no real justification for.)

Danny came very late and since all the groups were done by the time he arrived we just gave him a score sheet and sent him on his way. Joseph noticed he had something like 850 million after ball 1 on Rush, so he let him know that he had already beaten everyone else and could go on to play the rest of his games. I was desperately behind on work and trying to do some work at this point so I think Joseph just wanted to help me be able to go home as soon as possible. Danny was actually able to go back and continue his suspended Rush game, still just waiting for someone to shoot, after finishing the rest of his games for the night. He was still playing as we left for the night.

The Smackdown game was Monster Bash, which I did terrible at. I had a score of 5 million and insisted on playing a second game just so I didn’t have to leave a score that embarrassing on the score sheet. On my second try, I got 3 million. Tim ended up winning the Smackdown, and since we only had six competitors, the B division was played between me and Mark. I had a narrow victory on Attack from Mars. This was Mark’s first official IFPA tournament, though he quickly followed it with a second one by playing at Silver Balls in the City.

Speaking of Silver Balls, I will eventually have a pile of photos from that tournament and I promise to upload them to the league Flickr pool (which exists) and the Facebook group eventually. I don’t promise when.

Our last league night was the fourth of Season 17, and it was also two days before Thanksgiving, which I predicted would result in a low turnout. This was good, actually, because we needed to even out the banks. We had started with a single bank session, then did a two-bank rotation for the next two nights, so if we could have another single bank night that would get things straightened back out for the likelihood that we would need to rotate the rest of the season.

We were down a few regulars, including Allen (who had gone home to Texas for the holiday), Dan, and Donny, but more people showed up than I had figured on. Just before the start time we still had few enough people to get everyone into four banks, which is our cutoff for a single bank this season, with a couple of empty spots in case anyone came late. I was just about to get things started when we were surprised by the appearance of a couple of new players: Rick K. and Abby D., late of the Indiana scene, but newly relocated to Grand Rapids. We were still all right with four groups of four until Linda made a late appearance. Joseph split himself off from one of the other groups and formed a two-person group with Linda, returning us to the “good” old days of having a group on every game in the bank. There were some backups, but it wasn’t too awful, and at least we can return to rotating banks the rest of the season.

I’m not sure if Rick and Abby are going to come back regularly – I think they didn’t realize that only the overall season results get submitted to the IFPA – but Rick did get the second highest score for the bank. He asked where the good places to play are in Michigan that are within an hour drive of Grand Rapids, and besides the obvious choice of RLM Amusements in Grand Rapids, some of us also recommended the Clubhouse Arcade in Fremont.

Jake and Sam made it out from Grand Rapids again, and one of the first things Jake said to me was “Heather! Take a picture!” This was in reference to the dramatic re-creation photos in the last recap and my asking people to make sure to tell me to take photos next time. He added that he was torn about it because he actually kind of wanted me to forget to take photos so I could do more dramatic re-creations. I admitted that we kind of ran out of ideas after we did three of them.

Todd has been playing his games early this season because of his work schedule, but he was able to play with the rest of the league on this occasion, and even stayed to play in the Smackdown B-division playoff. He said it was his first ever Smackdown finals, since he usually can’t stay for it. Todd ended up beating me in a two-person match on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to win the Undercard. Meanwhile, Tim won the A division championship on Star Trek.

Our next meeting tomorrow is the fifth of the season, bringing us past the halfway point, which means this is the last chance to join and still qualify for finals. I am planning to play a two-bank rotation unless turnout is very low. This will be our last league meeting before the New Year, since our next meeting will be postponed for Silver Balls in the City. See you soon!