Eighteen rounds.
One Elvira comeback for the ages.
A Godzilla apocalypse in the finals.
And apparently… seven and a half hours of “golf,” according to Fitbit. 😄
June Desert Dolls at North Mountain Brewing turned into an absolute endurance event filled with survival pinball, emotional swings, neon lights, and enough incidental exercise to make a fitness tracker completely lose the plot.
The night started as a standard 4 Strikes knockout tournament: survive and advance.
But as the rounds stacked up, every machine demanded a completely different style of play:
– Black Knight: Sword of Rage punished hesitation and rewarded survival instincts.
– Cactus Canyon Remake became a lesson in patience and controlled shooting.
– Elvira’s House of Horrors delivered one of the biggest momentum swings of the night.
– And then Godzilla Premium/LE arrived as the final boss battle.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, Elton John’s “I’m Still Standing” started playing through my right earbud, which honestly felt a little too perfect for an 18-round knockout run. 😂
The Elvira match ended up being one of the defining moments of the tournament.
After falling behind early, the comeback started building slowly:
– skill shots,
– mode progression,
– Wild Women locks,
– controlled ramps,
– patient recovery.
What looked like a runaway game suddenly turned into a huge comeback victory, flipping a massive deficit into a 54M win and pushing the finals battle even deeper into the night.
And here’s where the “incidental exercise” part enters the story.
By the end of the tournament, Fitbit logged the event as:
– 7 hours 30 minutes
– 1,240 calories burned
– 77 active zone minutes
– 1 hour 17 minutes in moderate cardio
– Average heart rate: 95 BPM
The funniest part?
Fitbit categorized the whole thing as “Golf.” 😄
But honestly, the tracker data proves something I talk about all the time:
pinball is sneaky movement.
Incidental Exercise Receipts
Tournament pinball means hours of:
– standing,
– shifting weight,
– shoulder tension,
– controlled movement,
– walking machine to machine,
– adrenaline spikes,
– stress recovery,
– nudging,
– focus management,
– and mental endurance.
It may not look like “traditional exercise,” but the body absolutely knows the difference after 18 rounds.
And the graph told the story perfectly:
steady light cardio for hours with repeated moderate spikes during close matches and pressure moments.
Basically:
“sustained low-grade battle mode.”
The finals eventually landed on Godzilla Premium/LE, where Hailey Buhrman unleashed an absolutely nuclear 302M monster game worthy of an actual kaiju movie ending.
Final standings:
🥇 Hailey Buhrman
🥈 Christy Kohtz
🥉 Gabrielle “Gabby” Craft
4️⃣ Janel Valdez
One of the coolest parts of the night was how connected the top four felt to the larger Arizona women’s pinball community.
Hailey and I had already battled earlier this year in Women’s State Finals, where she took first and I took second. Somehow, after 18 rounds of Desert Dolls knockout pinball chaos, the arcade gods decided we needed a rematch. 😄
Meanwhile, Gabby Craft — who finished third — was also the announcer/commentator during the live-streamed Women’s State Finals matchup between Hailey and me earlier this year, which made the whole thing feel weirdly full-circle.
And Janel Valdez, who took fourth, has been one of the longtime leaders helping keep Desert Dolls running and growing over the years.
Seeing all four of us there at the end honestly felt like a snapshot of the Arizona women’s pinball scene in one standings screen:
players, organizers, streamers, competitors, community-builders, and friends all wrapped together.
The best part?
Hailey had to work for it. And so did I.
The standings showed a clear separation from the rest of the field, with the final battle stretching all the way to Round 18 before the final strike landed. That’s not “getting lucky and hanging around.” That’s endurance, adaptation, resilience, and surviving machine after machine until only two players remained.
Also important tournament math:
– Entry fee paid
– Tiny orange cooler trophy acquired
– $15 won off chips
– Calories burned: 1,240
Technically, I would have made $20 off chips, but I had to cash one in midway through the tournament to pay for the rest of my games, which feels like the most pinball sentence ever written. 😂
And honestly?
Not bad for a chick competing with:
– a sore shoulder,
– a bruised hip,
– heat exhaustion,
– hot flashes,
– and seven and a half hours of Arizona arcade heat.
Still counts.
Huge thanks to everyone who came out, competed, laughed, supported each other, organized the event, and helped make another fantastic Desert Dolls monthly happen. Nights like this are exactly why the Arizona pinball community continues to be such a special place to compete.
And finally, before I drove home, the universe attempted one last side quest by presenting me with a mysterious sunset parking-lot cat perched beneath razor wire like some kind of post-apocalyptic desert guardian.
Thankfully, “Barbed Wire Billy” returned to wherever he came from before I accidentally adopted another cat while Andrew was out of town. 😄
Cat safe, marriage intact, 5-Cat household not reorganized. Phew!
Still counts.
More Desert Dolls Pinball Collective posts? Read more.