Hey Belles!,
Our latest meetup was an adventure of epic proportions as we celebrated the launch of Dungeons & Dragon’s: The Tyrant’s Eye! We had 15 players join in on 9 holes of pin-golf, including two first-timers—shoutout to Emily, who runs Belles tournaments in Iowa for making the drive out!
🏆 Winners’ Circle 🏆
Grand Champ of the launch event went to the person who got the highest score on Dungeons & Dragons during our 9 hole course.
Congrats to Mary!
Mary was top seed of the day, and she naturally chose D&D for the finals round. Top 4 were:
🏆 Mary
🥈 Donelle
🥉 Tiffany
🎮 Lauren
The awesome D20 trophies mark our first time offering 3D-printed prizes. A huge thank you to Tiffany for making that happen! She says to look forward to more 3D printed trophies for in the future.
More Treasure to Loot!
Along with the D20 trophies, we had some other cool things to win including the D&D translite, a baby Mind Flayer figure, and D20 earrings.
We had two virtual duck races to see who would win the Mind Flayer and the translite. The races were tense and our cheers could be heard echoing through the hall.
The Mind Flayer went to
Sharkey!
And a translite to Tiffany!
Dori, Shay, and Tamara won their respective groups during their finals, so they scored the D20 earrings!
📅Upcoming Events – Double Tap and…? 📅
Our next event is downtown at Double Tap (Tap Tap) – Madison on April 9th. Registration begins at 6:00PM, and we start playing at 6:30PM.
Entry fee is $5 which goes to IFPA dues and helps funds our fun trophies. Normally coin drop is required, but this venue uses tap cards, so you may have a card handy in your wallet already. Otherwise, initial cost to buy a card is $5 and you can load as much money as you want on the card. Your Belles organizers (Jacque and Tiffany) have a joint Belles cards if folks want to share as opposed to buying a new one.
We encourage you to RSVP on Facebook. It helps the engagement on our page and can drive additional viewers to the event.
Additionally, we have to have more pin-golf on Sunday, April 27th. We are still securing our location, so please keep an eye on Facebook for updates. It will likely either be at Aftershock Arcade or the Kickback.
With that being said… Going forward, we plan to host regularly scheduled pin-golf meetups on the fourth Sunday of each month. Inclusivity and growing pinball are at the heart of our mission, and by offering a daytime event on Sundays, we can be more accessible to those with busy weekday schedules. Many of our interested players find it difficult to attend evening meetups due to work, school, or the need for an early bedtime. We hope this additional meetup day will bring even more lovely faces into our community!
🌟Pinball Tips: Star Wars Action Button🌟
Last month we shared a large master list of what the action button does on a huge list of games. We want to take some extra time to call out Stern’s Star Wars as it is imperative to understand how the action button and multipliers work to get consistently high scores. It’s one of the games where it is a huge disadvantage if you don’t know about them. If you’ve seen someone have a crazy 40x multiplier, this is how.
You’ll notice that there are arrows around the playfield with an X in them (two of them circled in lime green). Those are your multiplier shots when lit green. Keep in mind that it doesn’t increase your multiplier, it’s just a shot that has an applied multiplier. To increase this multiplier, you need to hit the three bank in front of the LCD screen. If you take the time to squint really hard or get a magnifying glass, you’ll see that it tells you directly above those targets (circled in white). You can see your current multiplier on the main screen.
If you hit the action button, the arrow will turn red and this will deactivate the multiplier shot, but it will allow you to move the shots around using your flippers. Most people cradle the ball before attempting this. To reactivate the shot, just hit the action button again, and those arrows will turn green again.
Downside to all of this is that the higher the multiplier, the less shots that will be activated to get said multiplier. Additionally, your built multiplier is on a timer and will timeout back to 2x unless you hit the 3 bank again. Multiplier does work for mystery awards and video modes as well. Use this knowledge wisely.
If you want to learn about the other functions of the action button, you can watch this short video where Pinball Jen does a high level review of the action button on Star Wars.
📢In Case You Missed It:
Women’s IFPA Championships📢
Over the weekend, the Women’s IFPA Championship took place at Port City Pinball in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, featuring both the North American Nationals and the World Championship. Miriam Nadler (NY) took home the Nationals title, while Keri Wing claimed the World Championship!
You can watch part of the tournaments on BackhandPinball’s Twitch page under their recent VODs. If looking for a monster of a comeback, check out game 5 of the World Championship finals between Keri Wing and Kaylee Campbell on Deadpool—at this point, Kaylee led 3 games to 1 in the best-of-7 match.
⏩ Jump to timestamp 09:39 if you don’t want to watch the full 30-minute game. At the start of ball 3, Keri sat at 52 million, while Kaylee had already finished with 930 million. (Spoiler: Keri wins the championship 😉) It only takes one ball. Truly inspiring.
There’s no official IFPA results page yet, but we’ll share updates on Facebook once they’re posted!
Catch you at the next meetup! Bring your A-game and your best boot saves!
– Belles & Chimes Planning Team