Last Tuesday we had the official launch party for the new Dungeons and Dragons: the Dragon's Dungeon pinball game, fresh from Stern. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger had called it off the day before, on the grounds that our venue didn't have the game yet, and then one arrived at our hipster barcade just hours later and everything was on again. (Between league meetings, and this tournament, and the charity tournament next week, and the ERR memorial tournament in early April, we're looking at seven Tuesdays in a row committed to pinball stuff.)
When we got there, first, I complimented RED on going over and swiping Grand Rapids Pinball League's Dungeons and Dragons game. He didn't hear me at first (he has a bad ear and I always talk into that) but when he got what I was saying he liked and riffed on that. Second, although we'd been warned to expect a game leaving the venue because there's no place to put in another, guess what? RED made the room, squeezing together five games until there was room for a sixth in the row.
The format was four-strikes, maybe the easiest tournament format to run that has room for real drama. The game computer at Matchplay.events draws up pairs of people on games randomly drawn (although one of the matches would always be Dungeons and Dragons), and everyone plays until they've lost four times. Except one person, who's the tournament winner and goes home with the plaque. Stern Pinball took to sending out plaques with the championship logo not attached to the wood backing; bunnyhugger has taken to attaching those herself because she knows how to do it right.
There were 17 people there, enough that for once I was not in the homewrecker match against bunnyhugger. We never played each other. Instead, CST --- returning for the first time since Silver Balls in the City --- and his wife got one head-to-head match. (He won.) I did play CST once, on Tales of the Arabian Nights, a game that he knew well from his time as perennial Lansing Pinball League champion. He put up a meager 1.2 million; a normal game would be easily five times that, and his level something like ten times that. Not that it did me any good, as I failed to break a million points on it.
Other than that, though, I had a really good run: I ended up lasting ten rounds and going out, beaten by RED on Dungeons and Dragons on the live stream to ... some ... number of people on Twitch. bunnyhugger had a pretty good night herself, lasting eight rounds and only being knocked out by the combination of FAE on Scared Stiff and DMC on AC/DC.
It was RED had the best night of all, though, never once losing a game of Dungeons and Dragons, which was really good for him as the last rounds all ended up on that game. After I handed him his last strike --- on Cactus Canyon, one of the games somehow I'm the only one who knows how to play --- he went on to knock me out of the tournament on Dungeons and Dragons, and then he knocked out DG, a solid player who was having a better-than-average night. And then, in two matches in a row, beat CST, taking what turned out to be his first-ever launch party win, and only his fifth first-place finish ever (discounting the small-potatoes Tuesday Night Smackdown games). If bunnyhugger or I couldn't win, it was pretty nice that he could take it.
When last we looked at Kings Island photos we were underneath the cover of The Beast's queue and seeing fireworks. You know what else goes with fireworks?
Yes, they had a drone show, the bread crumbs that extend the meatloaf of the fireworks! Can you make out the formation up there, through all the slats making a shading cover of The Beast's line? (It was the Kings Island logo.)
bunnyhugger was lightly annoyed that I could work out what all these drone shapes were and she couldn't, what with her being so much farther from the drone show and all.
Fireworks over, drone show over, we're on the way again to The Beast. Here's the station by night, with WindSeeker in the distance. Last time we were here, Vortex would have been blurrily in frame.
People done with their ride for the night. The illuminated white arch in the distance is the Racer, and the blue lift hill Orion, which doesn't threaten the seclusion of The Beast as much as we'd feared.
Did not expect that Older Young Sheldon would be in line behind us! Let's have a big hand everybody!
And here we are leaving after our ride. That's Diamondback (which we didn't ride in the few hours we had) on the left there, and the park's Eiffel Tower in the distance on the right.
Trivia: Between 1815 and 1865 roads in France improved enough that the average load pulled by a single horse rose from 1400 pounds to three thousand. Source: The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography, Graham Robb.
Currently Reading: The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs, Stephen B Johnson.
