This entire week before the major winter holiday left me in dire need of a pinball break. And so, Saturday night, after a chaos-filled week of dealing with novelty toys, greeting cards, gift cards, and other miscellaneous merchandise and elements of retail, I finally had the time and energy to stick my head in at Del Mar Lanes for what will likely be the last time in 2023.

The first thing to notice was that there was a new grand champion who put up a score well over 500M. Many of my mode-specific high scores were still intact, and the romp that the new champion went on appears to have been limited to one game as the previous high scores had only been pushed down one place.

Not surprisingly, the score to get a replay had spiked dramatically, to 52.75M. Between me and whatever other wizards haunt this bowling alley, apparently the replay percentage finally went high enough.Despite this I was still able to win a couple of replays from my original three paid credits on this visit; in both games I scored double the replay score and then some. This was despite having a few balls end early due to some kind of issue with the machine (reported via Pinball Map).

Despite no stratospheric high scores, this was a pretty good visit.