Highlights in brief: 80.5M+ on Star Trek, 796k+ on Jacks to Open. The rest weren’t really anything special.

(This was originally supposed to be a league night for Bayou City Pinball League, but cancelled due to low attendance.)

It’s that time again. The Texas Pinball Festival is this weekend, March 21-23. As you may have heard, the tournament format has completely changed this year. Instead of the previous “limited entries” format, the field of 160 players will be divided into two groups of 80, an “early” group (Friday 09:00-16:00, Saturday 09:00-14:00) and a “late” group (Friday 17:00-24:00, Saturday 14:00-19:00) for a matchplay qualifier. This year, I am in the “early” group.

One good change deserves another. The live updates will be moved to a new Telegram announcements channel. This should hopefully be easier to follow and will allow me to keep announcements separate from my usual posts to Mastodon.

I may or may not be able to update this blog post with the tournament scoreboard link when it becomes available. It will likely be posted to the Telegram group linked previously before I update this post.

The livestreams of the finals will once again be on Wormhole Pinball’s Twitch feed. With the new format and required schedule, this unfortunately wreaks significant havoc on my plans to play in other tournaments being offered over the weekend. If those happen they’ll be on the Telegram channel.

I’m looking forward to being “back in the saddle again” for what is now the fourth year in a row. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

It’s now time for me to start packing and rest up for a long drive tomorrow. See you in Frisco.

(Edit: I will likely have one or two arcade visit posts to make before the TPF recaps. There’s just not enough time left to catch up.)

I headed down to Eureka Heights with the primary goal of socializing with a few people I knew would be there for a tournament (even though I would not be able to play in it, or really, didn’t have much desire to try to play in it even if able).

Amazingly, I managed to squeak in a couple of games of pinball while I was there. This includes a game on The Jetsons, which is a rare game from Spooky Pinball with only 100 units manufactured.

There’s not a whole lot to report on when it comes to my February visit to Einstein’s. The main highlight is the Guardians of the Galaxy score of 148.6M+. My score on Black Knight: Sword of Rage of 55.5M+ wasn’t too shabby (I feel like a really good run starts around 100M), the others are pretty ho-hum. (The 7.9M+ was on Game of Thrones; the translite was not lit.)

And so we turn the page to Valentine’s Day at Cidercade.

From a social standpoint, I did make more small talk than I usually do, but no strong connections. From a pinball and arcade gaming standpoint, I’d say the night went rather well. This evening brought my first games on Dungeons & Dragons: The Tyrant’s Eye as well as Metallica Remastered. On both of these I feel like I put up some good scores (301M+ and 78.3M+ respectively). Additional highlights include 106M+ on Black Knight: Sword of Rage (Pro), 126k+ on Pepper II, and 3.16M+ on The Beatles. The others I can take or leave for the most part.

I had time to drop by both Poison Girl and Little Dipper on this particular evening. The main highlight of the trip would have to be the 2.83M+ on Quicksilver. Actually, spoiler alert, it might well be the highlight of the entire month of February. Most of the other scores weren’t all that great save for Earthshaker at Poison Girl, which I am slowly relearning as time allows.