We passed the halfway mark of the season with our last meeting, at which we played banks 5 and 6, Argo Navis (the ship Argo) and Cetus (the sea monster). These were very appropriate banks for our first night with our shiny new Jaws LE game. Jaws was conveniently slotted into Argo Navis to replace the game that left to make room for it, Guns and Roses. This did mean we had to break our tradition of using the newest game for Tuesday Night Smackdown. Instead, Metallica got drawn for that honor.
It looked like we might have to replace Deadpool as it was suddenly not registering the scoop right before league was going to start. But Derik went and got his equipment and did some quick soldering, allowing us to start with the bank intact and just a few minutes late.
For some reason, it was a night with light attendance, and the number of people in attendance meant that some people were in two-player groups. I ended up playing with Ted and we both felt like we had solid nights. I had one embarrassingly bad game, but otherwise always felt like I was playing at least mediocre, and consistently mediocre is often enough to do pretty well. Everyone finished pretty early, and we started the Smackdown well before our average start time of 10 pm. So far, Derik is the champion of bank 5; appropriately, his Jaws score was huge. Tim has the lead in Bank 6 with big scores on just about everything in the bank.
In the Smackdown, Tim won B division, which is well known to be the Best division, and Joseph was the overall champion on Metallica.
The following Tuesday was the Stephen T. Kendrick Memorial March Hare Madness Charity Pinball Tournament, named in honor of a very special rabbit. We had 15 people attend, which is around average for this particular tournament. In recent years it has been a Critical Hit tournament, using the original Critical Hit Matchplay Edition deck. This continues to be a popular format – well, except among who keep getting bad card draws. A standout moment was when Ethan played the most powerful card in the deck, one that forces another player to trade games with you after Ball 2. Danny was then compelled to give up two high scoring balls on Tales of the Arabian Nights to play Ball 3 starting from about a million points. Ethan was so delighted by this that he came over to tell me before returning to his game. A while later he reappeared and, while laughing so hard he was wheezing, eventually managed to get out that Danny had come back and won anyway.
Things ran fairly late as always, and a few people ended up dropping out before the end, including Derik who would have made finals but decided to leave without playing. That bumped me up into finals. Unfortunately, Brian started the round by making everyone discard a random card, and that cost me the card I had been saving, one that forces someone to stop playing immediately. I was left with only a card I drew at the beginning, which makes everyone in the group play an entire game with the display covered. The game I deployed it on was Willy Wonka, so we had the ridiculous situation of having to cover just about the entire backbox of the game with newspaper. I don’t think it could have really helped me at that point, but as I said at the time, “I just want to watch the world burn.”
Joseph, to his surprise, ended up winning March Hare Madness, with Tim in second, and Brian in third. I ended up with fourth. And that’s another March Hare Madness in the books. We made $256 for the Rabbit and Small Animal Rescue, thanks in considerable part to a $100 donation from Pinball Pete’s, as well as all the players.