Tessa Morton Tops 23 Players at Pinball Gallery

Tessa Morton Takes Ball Busters W4 as Aztec Turns 50

Under the lights at Pinball Gallery on Wednesday night, one machine on the floor had been built exactly 50 years ago. Aztec, a Williams game that first shipped in July 1976, sat in a lineup of 82 titles that runs all the way up to brand-new 2026 releases — and in the third round of the Ball Busters women’s league, the half-century-old table was still doing its job. Spinner rattling, pop bumpers snapping, it drew a four-player group, and Tessa Morton walked away from it with the top score.

That Aztec win was one of four Morton posted across the night. The Malvern player arrived as the field’s clear rating favorite and left with the title, closing out a 23-player card where the story kept drifting back to the oldest machine in the room.

From the Back of the Seeding, Kate Cicero Climbs

The format was straightforward: 30 group games across 5 rounds, points by finishing position, most points takes it. What made the early going worth watching was who set the pace. Morton opened by winning her group on Joker Poker, then took KISS in Round 2, and the highest-ranked name in the field was doing exactly what the seeding suggested she would.

The surprise was two flippers over. Kate Cicero came in unranked — no seed, no tournament history on file — and after a second-place finish on Led Zeppelin to start, she simply stopped losing rounds. Eight Ball Deluxe in Round 2, then a pair of wins to come, turned an anonymous entry into a genuine contender. Abby Tague, a newer competitor whose recent results had run deep into the pack, announced herself early too, taking the longest game of the opening round on Dungeons & Dragons.

It helped that the setting rewards a night like this. Pinball Gallery carries a 4.9 rating across nearly 300 reviews, and the notes patrons leave tend to land in the same place — a friendly floor that treats a first-timer and a regular the same, machines spanning decades, the pull of an arcade you half-remember from childhood. On a Wednesday, that room hums.

Aztec at 50, and the One Game Tessa Lost

Fifty years is a long time for a pinball machine to keep pulling players, and Aztec has earned the birthday. Williams shipped the game in July 1976 — one of 10,150 built — with a playfield laid out by designer Gordon Horlick and a Historical–World Places theme rooted in the Aztec empire. It comes from the era before digital displays and computerized scoring, when a machine’s whole personality lived in its mechanics, and it has outlasted nearly everything that shared a factory floor with it.

That personality is all in the layout. Two flippers feed a table built around a single spinning target, with three DC pop bumpers and a pair of slingshots keeping the ball busy up top, six standup targets to work through, and an upper-right kickback lane that can hand back a ball you thought was gone. Everything settles into the end-of-ball bonus, which is where a strong Aztec game quietly adds up. The line of attack hasn’t changed in 50 years: plunge for the middle lane to light the spinner, then shoot the left orbit all day to milk it. The spinner is the engine; the orbit is how you keep feeding it.

Half a century on, it was still setting scores at Pinball Gallery, and it came up twice on the night. Morton solved it in Round 3, taking her group and padding her lead, and by then she looked untouchable. A round later, Samantha Christina answered with an Aztec win of her own over a four-player field. A 1976 game holding its own in the middle of a 2026 league card is exactly what keeps a floor of 82 machines — 51 years between the oldest and the newest — worth walking end to end.

The night’s sharpest turn came one machine over. In Round 4, on Fish Tales — a 1992 Williams game — Christina Kirby, an IFPA #13841 whose rating has been climbing over the past year, knocked the favorite off in an 11-minute three-player group, with Jennifer Gold taking third. The ratings had pegged Kirby’s chances at roughly one in four, and it was the only round all night Morton didn’t win. Cicero kept her own run clean through the same stretch, taking KISS in Round 3 and Paragon in Round 4 — three straight round wins stacked between her two second-place finishes, and a real lead carried into the final round from the very bottom of the draw.

Kim Smith’s Late Charge and a Fifth-Round Reckoning

The fifth round is where the standings hardened, and Kim Smith made sure it wasn’t quiet. The strongest state-ranked player in the building at PA #55, Smith had opened slowly — third in each of the first two rounds — before catching fire. She won Taxi, then AC/DC, and in Round 5 she drew Seawitch, a 1980 Stern Electronics game, against Cicero herself.

Smith won it, with Kathy Furlong third and Samantha Christina fourth. Beating the eventual runner-up head-to-head in the last round is no small thing, but the arithmetic had already tilted; Cicero’s second place there was enough to protect her position. The result did settle a couple of long-running threads. Smith edged in front of Samantha Christina to break what had been a dead-even rivalry across their seven shared events, while Abby Tague, evenly matched with Christina over 20 tournaments together, finished ahead again to stretch her slim edge.

Morton closed the door on Eight Ball Deluxe, her fourth win of the evening, and the final margins were tight at the top. She finished on 23 points, Cicero on 21, Tague on 19, and then a three-way logjam at 18 for fourth — Smith alongside Anita Thallmayer and top seed Terri Morton, who had entered ranked first and landed just outside the podium.

Malvern’s Half-Century Table

By closing time the through-line was hard to miss. A machine older than most of the players in the room had held its own on a floor full of modern competition machines, deciding scores in Round 3 like it was 1976 and the arcade had just opened. That’s the quiet appeal of a place with 82 games and a 50-year span between the oldest and the newest: the past keeps a seat at the table.

The favorite delivered on it. Tessa Morton hadn’t won any of her previous five events, and on Aztec’s birthday she put together the steadiest night of the field. Behind her, Kate Cicero’s climb from an unseeded entry to second was the run of the evening, and Abby Tague’s third was a clear step up from where her recent results had been sitting.

Final podium, Ball Busters Pinball League — Summer 2026 W4:

• 1st — Tessa Morton (23 pts)
• 2nd — Kate Cicero (21 pts)
• 3rd — Abby Tague (19 pts)