Round two, Dungeons & Dragons: The Tyrant’s Eye, fifteen minutes on the clock and the two players who would eventually share the title standing shoulder to shoulder at the same glass. Rach Duran got there first on Brian Eddy’s dungeon crawler, edging Elyza Brillantes for the five points while Claire Sannier and Suzie Heller filled out the group. It was a small moment — one game of thirty-six — but it captured the shape of the whole night: Brillantes, the field’s clear rating favorite, and Duran, a seven-year veteran still chasing her first win, trading blows at the top of the sheet.
By the time the second round wrapped at The 1up Arcade Bar on Colfax, neither had pulled decisively clear. When the points settled, they sat level — co-champions of the eighth Colfax Queens summer stop, with Maybe Woodhouse a step back in third. No single silhouette on the trophy this time; two names, tied at the summit.
A Full House on Colfax Avenue
The 1up’s Colfax location is a Denver institution — a bar and club stuffed with dozens of classic arcade cabinets and pinball machines, with live music acts rotating through and a 4.6-star reputation built over nearly 2,800 reviews. It’s a fitting home for a recurring women’s series that keeps drawing regulars who all know one another’s tendencies at the flippers. Outside, the night ran warm and clear, 92 degrees with a few clouds and low humidity.
Twenty-three players filed in for this Group Match Play format — four-player groups where the field allowed, three-player groups where it didn’t, points awarded by finishing order across two rounds. The draw was a standard competitive mix: eleven IFPA-ranked entrants against twelve unranked, a national average hovering around #18,724. Nine players carried Colorado NACS state rankings, averaging out near #247 in a pool of 771. Deanna Scalf, at IFPA #3,650, was the strongest name on paper, with Brillantes not far behind. On a lineup of 27 machines ranging from a 1989 solid-state cabinet to Stern’s brand-new Pokémon, there was plenty of room for the sheet to scramble.
Brillantes Owns the Glass
If the final standings were a tie, the machine-by-machine story belonged to Brillantes. The Denver player posted the top score on four of the six machines she touched — a stat that reads like a runaway even when the point total didn’t quite become one. She opened Round 1 by taking Beetlejuice, then The Addams Family, then JAWS, three straight wins to stake her claim, and closed her night with a victory on Pokémon in Round 2.
Her game log across the tournament tells the tale in miniature: first place on Addams, first on JAWS, first on Pokémon, first on Beetlejuice, with only D&D and Star Wars: Fall of the Empire slipping to a runner-up finish behind Duran. Against the rest of the field she was untouchable — she finished ahead of Kenzie Corkill, Sarah Miler, Julie Juarez, Claire Sannier and Suzie Heller in every game they shared. It’s the kind of night that fits her arc: an IFPA #3,774 with a career peak of #2,841 and a dozen wins over the last three years, she came in the player others had to beat.
The one player who consistently found daylight against her was Duran. Across the three games the two co-champions shared, Duran finished ahead in two of them, including that Round 2 D&D game and a win on Fall of the Empire. Brillantes got the last word on Pokémon, but the margin between them never widened into anything decisive.
Duran’s Long-Awaited First
For Rach Duran, this was more than a shared trophy — it was a maiden win. Sitting at IFPA #60,357 with a career peak of #30,462 back in 2021, she’d logged 35 prior events without a title before Colfax #8. She answered the moment by going a perfect two-for-two in the rounds, the only player in the field to win both of her groups outright.
Her Round 1 was ruthless in the three-player pod: she took KISS in a brisk seven minutes, then Godzilla, dropping only The Big Lebowski to Madeline Thomas. Round 2 brought the D&D and Star Wars wins over Brillantes’ group before that final Pokémon game closed the gap. She finished ahead of Sophie Sartori, Claire Sannier and Suzie Heller in every shared game — a clean, efficient run to the top of a field where she’d long been a familiar face without the hardware to show for it.
Maybe Woodhouse, meanwhile, quietly assembled the night’s third-best card. Just a year into competitive play across ten career events, she won her Round 1 group on the strength of Medieval Madness and Tales of the Arabian Nights, then took Star Wars: Fall of the Empire in Round 2 to hold third. She finished ahead of Deanna Scalf in two of their three shared games — a notable scalp against the field’s top-ranked entrant.
The Games That Stretched the Night
Not every story lived at the top of the standings. Early in Round 1, on the Bally classic Creature from the Black Lagoon, Diane Minton got the better of Markie Cecelones in a four-player, 28-minute grind. That cabinet — John Trudeau’s 1992 drive-in fantasy with Kevin O’Connor art, some 7,841 units built and a hologram of the Creature glowing up from beneath the playfield — remains one of the deepest pulls on any floor, and Minton solved it when it mattered, flipping the result after Cecelones had taken the earlier Tales of the Arabian Nights game in the same pod.
The marathon of the evening came on Stern’s new Pokémon, the machine that closed the night. Deanna Scalf outlasted Bethany Moore, Lorelei Hayes and Yulie Grubbs across a staggering 74 minutes — the longest game of the tournament by a wide margin — to bank five points in the round’s opening frame. Scalf topped Godzilla and Pokémon on her way to sixth overall, a reminder that the field’s strongest-ranked player was never far from the action even on a night the title went elsewhere.
No Solo Reign, and That’s the Point
There’s something fitting about a series called the Queens crowning two of them. Duran’s first win after seven years and 35 events is the kind of breakthrough these local nights exist to produce, and she earned it the hard way — perfect in both rounds, unbeaten against everyone below her. Brillantes, for her part, played like the favorite she was, stamping her name on four different machines, and simply couldn’t shake the veteran who kept matching her stride for stride.
So the trophy gets shared. Elyza Brillantes and Rach Duran finished level at the top, co-champions of Colfax Queens #8, with Maybe Woodhouse completing the podium in third.
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