Last summer Pinball Pete's ordered The Mandalorian, the newest Star Wars pinball game, for our league's venue. As usual, then, they planned a launch party, a tournament celebrating the game. We didn't have the game in place yet, but it was easy enough to start one: pick a suite of star-themed games, and everyone reports their best scores on them. This gives seeding that would go into a tournament. All we needed was the actual pinball game. Delivery got delayed, though, which will happen. And then delayed again. And again. The first couple times around bunny_hugger just rescheduled the final tournament. But Stern Pinball kept having problems producing the game. At one point I heard a rumor that there was some problem affecting all the playfields, which seems amazing considering these are painted blocks of wood with holes cut in them. Two even newer pinball machines --- Godzilla and Rush --- arrived after Mandalorian was originally supposed to be here, and we didn't suppose the tournament would ever happen. And then the game arrived, and it was time to pick a date and have the actual launch party. (Between the announcement of an actual date and the launch party, another new game --- Avengers Infinity Quest --- arrived. It plays no part in this story except to underscore how much time the game took to deliver.) bunny_hugger picked this past Tuesday, since we usually have league nights and events on Tuesdays. Afterwards we realized a fresh Star wars game should have been celebrated on Wednesday, you know, May the 4th. Not a single person observed anything about it at the time. We ended up with nine people playing, eight league regulars and someone who ... just happened to be there? But he seemed to have a good time, not hurt by his having the luck to win a Mandalorian translite, the big poster that goes in the back of a pinball machine. (We'd just gotten a fresh box of them from Stern.) So this made the tournament a three-stage one. Three groups of three people would start out, playing three games each, the top two finishers in each group moving on. Those six people would form into two three-person groups, the top two in each group moving on. And then a four-person finale. It would make the night sprawl a bit, but it also means the tournament has some value to the International Flipper Pinball Association. I got knocked out in the first round. Also knocked out early: the 2013 Star Trek game, and the 1993 Star Trek: The Next Generation game. The 2013 game's loss was a fluke: a piece of rubber came loose in a way to make the ball get stuck a lot. The 1993 game's loss was also a fluke, but a less surprising one. That game's always having issues. This time, the drain stopped registering, so a lost ball would just make things ... wait a half-minute. The table then supposed a ball was stuck and sent out a 'chaser', an extra ball so the player could knock the stuck one loose. So both games would be knocked out, while the two Star Wars tables in the venue (plus the 90s game Attack From Mars) soldiered on. Also soldiering on: bunny_hugger, who had figured to use the time after she was knocked out to do some work. She kept not being knocked out, though, managing to squeak out MAG in the first round and JAB in the second. This is a brilliant use of the ``deadline pressure'' effect where if you have to leave in ten minutes you can't lose your ball. Before she could sit down and get anything useful done, she was in finals. The games played in the final round would be the three still available --- Attack From Mars (on which she did well the whole night); The Mandalorian (on which she did not-bad, considering she has no idea the rules); and Star Wars, the 2015 Stern game. That was a bad omen for the closing game since it has a particularly difficult mechanism. The trick sounds simple: some of the major shots are multiplied. You get to pick which ones. You can move them. Different parts of the game make different shots naturally worth more. The expert players know how to time the game so they move the multipliers to the most valuable shots they're about to make. bunny_hugger is not good at this. She usually sets the multiplers on a couple of shots she's able reliably to make, and that often but not always have the most valuable shots on them. So she has a much sharper cap on what scores she can put up, even when she is playing well, as she was Tuesday night. And then there we go but she has a killer game. She does exactly the correct basic strategy for any modern pinball game: start a mode, and bring it into multiball. She got a mode, and a multiball, that put most of the most valuable shots on those multiplier shots. And she had a great multiball, one that kept alive and kept staying alive. Making more of the shots drove the multiplier value up, in the sort of exponential-growth curve that the expert players enjoy on this game. With one shot there was this wonderful, satisfying crack as the game served a replay, and she kept on going. When the ball ended --- at over 900 million points --- everyone applauded. She would finish the game at a little over a billion points, aided slightly by my pointing out one of the skill shots on her extra ball was free points. (We could plunge extra balls, maybe getting credit for the skill shot, but not play them.) The one menace: BMK had his ball yet to play. He only had a hundred million, but, a bit of luck added to his considerable skill and he could make that up in one ball. And, gads, he was doing it, too. He got Tie fighter Multiball started, and used that to finish a mode, and used that to start Victory Multiball. I should say, I have never gotten to Victory Multiball myself, and I understand like three or four things about this game. We watched, I with terror, as his multiplier ratcheted up to its maximum of 40x, before his multiball ended without making the really big shot. His ball ended just under a billion points. But he had an extra ball. He didn't get the skill shot that was just points, but he did get one that was bonus multipliers. I winced at the certain doom for my bride. BMK shook his head, confident he didn't have enough to overcome bunny_hugger's score, close as it was. The bonus counted out and totalled up and ... he was just short of her score. By, like, a couple million points on a pair of billion-point games. And this is how bunny_hugger won her second launch party in a row, at the cost of not getting any of her work done all night. Bit more of the local park from our Easter letterboxing. The Forks, part of what originally attracted White settlers to this part of Michigan. The waters were high and fast! I didn't realize it had rained that heavily and that long. The grass was also quite marshy, we learned, to our sad surprise. The park has a disc golf course and his is one of the tees. I'm not sure where the goal is but it'll be a pole with a basket of chains hanging from it. Trivia: On the 7th of May 1972, while propellants were being removed from the Apollo 16 Command Module, a tank card exploded. 46 persons were hospitalized for suspected inhalation of toxic fumes, but no one proved to have symptoms. Source: Apollo By The Numbers: A Statistical Reference, Richard W Orloff. NASA SP-4029. (The Command Module was not damaged.) Currently Reading: Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World , Joshua B Freeman. I'd picked it up on the bookstore expedition when I got my reading glasses (and that Michigan History magazine) and bunny_hugger did not literally roll her eyes at how very much this is the sort of book I always pick up.