I know it might be a bit of a short notice, but I wanted to pass this along for those not on Facebook or who do not check it often enough to see the (by now ubiquitous) advertisements for this event.

Thursday night (7/13) at 6:30pm we will be gathering at the Trini Mendenhall Community Center (1414 Wirt Road) for a few games of Rummikub. If you are new to the game, it is easy to learn and loads of fun, and makes for a great change of pace after a few nights of pinball or arcade gaming. There is an official video tutorial available at rummikub.com. (We are playing classic Rummikub as described in the first video, not “twist”.) If you know how to play the card game gin rummy (or any game similar to it), most of that knowledge should transfer over easily. The main difference with Rummikub is once you have played your initial meld, you can play on other melds on your board including moving tiles around as needed to complete melds, as long as the board is still valid at the end of your turn (i.e. there are no “dangling” tiles not part of a meld including the jokers).

I have posted two maps showing the location of Trini Mendenhall community center below (blue highlight).

So I was at a mainly board-game party for July 4 and the host had a couple of Arcade 1Up cabinets I got to play in between board games. One was a Midway/Atari multi-game setup, the other had The Simpsons and The Simpsons Bowling. Pictured are the scores from two one-coin (2000 health) games of Gauntlet, a two-coin (seven lives) game of Wizard of Wor, and one round of The Simpsons Bowling. Wizard of Wor I need to practice (I feel like I should be able to clear 20k with seven lives), but I think the others are pretty passable.

So not too long ago, yet another change was made to the lineup at Poison Girl. Attack from Mars is out, replaced with a Dolly Parton table (Bally, 1979). I’ve played this game before, most recently at the Texas Pinball Festival this year on Saturday. I put up a rather remarkable 444k+ that, for some reason, I omitted from the notable scores of the day in the original post. That score is about where the high score is on the machine at Poison Girl. Unfortunately, on this trip, I wasn’t able to get anywhere near that score, as this machine is set up much harder than the one at TPF. That, and the TPF score was the best of several games on free play; this one was my best of six games at 50 cents a pop (well, the first one was only 25 cents as there was apparently a half credit on the machine on arrival).

Other than that, a score 9.1M+ on Whirlwind rounded out the evening. Not a whole lot to write about with that one; obviously, I’m capable of much better, but it’s a decent run given I wasn’t really trying that hard.