About once a quarter we host a weekend friend party of sorts where we have LAN games, board games, etc. It's a time for all of us, many of whom we've known since childhood, to get together and hang out. The house turns into quite a zoo now that many of us have kids, but it's a blast!

This was the first time having one of these where I had my STTNG (my first, and currently only, pin) setup and working well. So I offered to host a simple tournament. It turned into quite a success and I want to improve it.

For the first go around I set the machine to free play. The highest score won the pot, with the exception that I had a Grand Master for my friend who owns face at STTNG by a considerable machine. He didn't get to play in the normal tournament as he was too good. Instead, he he defended his title, he got a portion of what I was going to make a progressive pot. If someone beat him, they got the whole thing.

I want to still equal out his obscene skills for the next one. But among the things discussed were going to a bracket heads-up format or just having a limited number of tournament plays. For the latter, I was thinking of giving everyone different colored quarters. Machine is on free play, but putting your quarter in means you're going for a tournament score.

Long story short, anyone have any ideas on that? I did a bit of searching here and found some awesome suggestions (like http://scottdanesi.com/WP/?page_id=161 for tournament software), but nothing about painting quarters or even if that's a good idea

Outside of tournament play, I put the machine in quarter/play mode and keep a jar of quarters next to the game, just for fun. I never make folks pay to play but I keep the quarters around as a sort of savings account - I devote the quarters of my loose change for marginal upgrades (like LEDs and such). So I don't want to switch the mechs to tokens or anything like that.

Aha didn't even think about that, but good idea, and there are a ton of colors! I was wanting to avoid gunking up the mechs mostly. If we do a bracket, there won't be a need. But since there's other things often happening at the same time, just doing a highest score wins but with only a set number of runs is a good compromise over just free play.

There were a lot of newb players this time who didn't know the basic rules so I'm glad we let things go. I suppose if I wanted to keep with that, but try to balance out skillsets I could add handicaps of better players having fewer plays or something.