Deanna Scalf spent the evening of July 2 working two jobs at once. She ran the fourth Summer Season stop of the Westy Colfax Queens — the pairings, the point-per-position math, the whole Group Match Play engine of a 16-player night — and then she went out and beat the field she’d organized. Under overcast skies and 85 degrees at The 1up Arcade Bar in Westminster, the IFPA #3676 posted the top score on four of the six machines she played and took first outright.
It’s a turn worth pausing on, because Scalf arrived cold. Her last five events had produced no wins and no podiums, a run that included a 49th at 5th Sunday Classics and a string of midpack finishes on the Colfax circuit. Seven events into the Colorado NACS season, her win column still read zero. After two rounds on Thursday night, it didn’t anymore.
Attack From Mars and a Two-Week-Old Pokémon
Scalf set the tone early. On the Chicago Gaming remake of Attack From Mars, she closed out a 16-minute game in first, with Ashley Morgan second, Kira Wulf third and Masha Dare fourth — the full 5 points and a clean start to Round 1. The Martians never stood much chance.
Then came the longer test. Pokémon (LE) is about as new as competitive pinball gets — Stern only shipped it on February 13, making it one of the freshest tables on the floor — and it held four players for 51 minutes. Scalf again came out on top, ahead of Masha Dare, with Ashley Morgan and Kira Wulf trailing. Two machines in, she owned the round.
The Creature Bites Back
The one Round 1 crack in Scalf’s night came on the oldest machine she touched all evening. Creature from the Black Lagoon is a 1992 Bally, designed by John Trudeau with art by Kevin O’Connor, roughly 7,800 of them built and still rated better than 8 out of 10 by the players who log these things — a drive-in-movie fantasy with a hologram of the gill-man glowing up from beneath the playfield. It rewards patience: spell F-I-L-M, lock your ball, and go hunting in the snack bar for the double jackpot.
On this night it belonged to Kira Wulf. In a tidy 12-minute game, Wulf took first over Scalf, with Masha Dare and Ashley Morgan behind — a result the ratings pegged at about a one-in-six shot in a four-player group. It knocked Scalf to second on the machine but not off the top of the round; she still closed Round 1 in first place in her group.
Ghostbusters and Beetlejuice Seal It
Round 2 opened with the second stumble. On Foo Fighters (Pro), a 15-minute sprint, Karen Mooney grabbed the win and Kyri Baker took second, leaving Scalf third in a group that also held Liv Volk. Two of the six machines had now gotten the better of her. She answered on the other four.
Ghostbusters (Pro) came next, and there’s a nice thread here: the 2016 Stern shares a designer with that ’92 Creature — John Trudeau again, this time hiding the “We Came, We Saw” mini-wizard behind a tree of modes and topping the whole thing with a color-changing Stay Puft. Scalf won it in 28 minutes over Mooney and Baker. Then she closed on Beetlejuice, Spooky Pinball’s 55-minute grinder that only reached the market last November, finishing first with Baker second and Volk third.
By the numbers, Scalf finished Round 2 in second — but the arithmetic of the two rounds held. She had gone ahead of Ashley Morgan, Masha Dare and Liv Volk in every game they shared, and edged Wulf, Baker and Mooney in two of three apiece. Four top scores out of six machines is how a first-place finish looks when the format spreads the field across that many tables.
A 66-Minute Marathon and a Tie for Second
If Scalf’s night was about breadth, the runners-up earned their share the harder way. Whitney Lockhart played the longest single game of the tournament — a 66-minute Ghostbusters standoff in Round 2 that she won over Ashley Morgan, Rach Duran and Mila Carabajal — and she’d already taken Godzilla and Jim Henson’s Labyrinth on the way there, climbing from second in Round 1 to first in Round 2. Lindsey Brown, out of Broomfield, matched her point-for-point across the day, winning Guardians of the Galaxy, the Attack From Mars remake and Batman 66 in her own groups. The two finished level, and the standings left them there rather than splitting hairs.
That’s the shape of it: a first-time NACS winner of the season who happened to be running the show, two players tied a step behind after long nights of their own, and a lineup that stretched from a 34-year-old Bally to a Pokémon table barely out of the box. Here’s how the Westy Colfax Queens’ fourth summer stop finished.
- 1st — Deanna Scalf (IFPA #3676)
- 2nd (tie) — Lindsey Brown (IFPA #7314)
- 2nd (tie) — Whitney Lockhart (IFPA #18298)
No comment yet, add your voice below!