Conrad Rustad Closes Out Fair Strikes While The Mandalorian Turns 5
Conrad Rustad never finished a round below second. Across all 10 rounds of Tik Tok’s Fair Strikes on July 13, the Bremerton player — IFPA #47 nationally, #3 in Washington — put up 7 wins and 3 runner-up finishes for an average round position of 1.3, and won on 5 of the 8 machines he played. The group knockout took 3 hours and 51 minutes from its 6:55 PM start, and Rustad was the last of 12 players standing.
He did it in a room 13 machines deep, spanning 1972 to 2025 and seven manufacturers. One of those machines had a birthday in the middle of it: Stern’s The Mandalorian (Premium) shipped in July 2021, which makes this month its fifth, and it still claimed 2 of the night’s 24 games.
Donovan Haga Opens on Oz, Mason Forsyth Opens Fast on Centaur
Tik Tok’s Workshop is a bar first, and on most weeknights the doors open at 4 PM and stay open until 2 AM — a comfortable margin for a tournament that needed just under four hours. It carries a 4.7 across 238 ratings, and regulars will tell you the reason is usually one person working the whole floor: cooking, pouring and keeping the playfields honest at the same time. Richard Godwin ran the night and played it.
Round 1 split the field three ways. Rustad started on World Cup Soccer and took a 25-minute game ahead of Colleen Godwin, Kelso Jordan and Kelly Frost. On Centaur, Mason Forsyth needed only 9 minutes to put four players away — Mario Alvarado second, Kate Janeway third, organizer Richard Godwin fourth. The Wizard of Oz (LE) went 21 minutes and to Donovan Haga, with Andrew McCann, Chris Wilkes and Bruce Cherry behind him.
Wilkes found his footing in round 2 and kept it. Hot Wheels, then Devil’s Dare, then Vulcan: three straight round wins, the longest such run anyone managed all night. Haga matched him for early consistency in a different way, opening 1-1 before Kelly Frost’s win on Vulcan in round 3 dropped him to third and cost him his first real ground.
Brian Eddy’s Mandalorian, Five Years In
The Mandalorian (Premium) celebrating a birthday this month was designed by Brian Eddy with art by Randy Martinez, and it shipped from Stern in July 2021 as a licensed fantasy and outer-space title. Its signature piece is the Grogu sculpture on the playfield, which is the part everyone points at, but the reason it keeps getting picked for tournament banks is underneath that.
The Premium runs four flippers where most machines make do with two, and it feeds them 13 standup targets, a spinning target, a hanging target, a scoop, an up-post, a diverter and a thrust magnet that can throw a ball back at you. Six pinballs are live in the machine, so multiball on this one is not a two-ball courtesy — it is the whole point of the layout. What it rewards is sequencing: consecutive scoops start a mission and light an extra ball, and three shots up the middle after that are what open multiball. Games take a while. Its two on July 13 averaged 22 minutes, the longest average of any of the night’s most-used machines.
Haga won both of them, which is the cleanest stretch of his tournament. In round 2 he finished ahead of Rustad, McCann and Richard Godwin over 23 minutes; in round 4 he did it again in 21, with Cherry second, Frost third and Alvarado fourth. Five years on from release, a machine that could easily have aged into scenery instead produced two of the longest games of the night and handed the eventual runner-up his margin.
Bruce Cherry’s Round 5 on World Cup Soccer
The ratings gave Bruce Cherry roughly a 1-in-4 shot in his round 5 group. He won it anyway, taking 17 minutes on World Cup Soccer with Frost second, McCann third and Janeway fourth. Cherry has been at this two years across 176 events and came in ranked #6599; McCann has 742 tournaments and 8 years behind him. That is the arithmetic a four-player group is entitled to ignore.
World Cup Soccer got the most work of any machine on the floor, 3 games in all. It is a 1994 Bally designed by John Popadiuk and Larry DeMar with art by Kevin O’Connor, 8,743 built, and the toy everyone remembers is the hemispherical soccer ball up at the right — it spins both directions and sends anything that touches it somewhere you did not plan on.
Cherry backed the upset up in round 6 with a win on Eight Ball. In that same round, Rustad beat Frost and McCann on Harlem Globetrotters On Tour in 9 minutes, on a 1978 Bally with three flippers and a famous gap between the two on the left that will take a ball straight down. Rustad and McCann have shared 18 tournaments over the years; this was one more evening in a long acquaintance, and it went Rustad’s way.
Eight Ball Settles It in 8 Minutes
Round 8 was where the field finally closed. Hot Wheels ran 30 minutes, the longest game of the night, and Haga took it with Rustad second and Cherry third. On the other bank, Wilkes and McCann played the last two-hander of the tournament on Dungeons & Dragons: The Tyrant’s Eye (Premium), 16 minutes, Wilkes ahead. McCann and Cherry finished the night tied at 4th.
That left three. Round 9 put them back on World Cup Soccer for 13 minutes — Rustad, then Wilkes, then Haga — and round 10 ended things on Eight Ball, a 1977 Bally, in 8 minutes flat. Rustad first, Haga second, Wilkes third, in the exact order the standings would print. Across the games they shared, Rustad finished ahead of Haga 3 times in 5, and Haga finished ahead of Wilkes 3 times in 5; the final board was less a verdict than a summary.
Fifty-Four Years of Machines, and the Five-Year-Old Held Its Slot
A lineup that runs from a 1972 Fireball to a 2025 Stern does not owe any single machine a place, and five years is long enough for a licensed title to slide down the bank and become scenery. The Mandalorian has been on floors longer than Chris Wilkes has been playing tournaments — 5 years against his 3 — and it still took 2 of the 24 games played, both of them long ones, both of them won by the man who finished second. Richard Godwin, who ran the tournament, finished 12th of 12; that is what it costs to organize and play at the same time.
Final podium — Tik Tok’s Fair Strikes 7/13
- Conrad Rustad (IFPA #47)
- Donovan Haga (IFPA #756)
- Chris Wilkes (IFPA #5886)
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