Stand Down!

So paintball worked us over. The mercury hit mid 90's with a sweltering 80 something percent humidity. I felt like I had gone home to Texas to play the game. But all ten of us valiantly soldiered on and sacrificed so we could hurl little plastic pellets of dayglo paint at 200 mph at each other.

And it was worth every drop of sweat.

Splat Action Paintball has many many acres of mock-combat fun. They have some forest and thicket fighting areas. They have a place called the village with structures for cover and crossfire. They even have a fort/fortification for a game named Attack and Defend.

The defenders start out inside the fort which has 360 dgrees of walls and netting (which stymies direct hits from paint balls) and two towers (for spotting and sniping). However, the defenders cannot leave the fort at all during the course of their first life. The attackers can attack from any direction. And when they are killed, the dead attacker must trudge back to base to "respawn" and then march back in to rejoin the fray (so the attacking force never truly loses).

Here's kicker. When a defender dies, he doesn't leave the game. Instead, the defender goes to the attacking team's home base and comes back to life and joins the attacking force. So as the deaths mount inside the fortress, the press of the assault becomes heavier. The increasingly desperate situation of the defenders adds significant tension to this game and heightens the anxiety level of the scenario.

We (all ten of us) were soaked with sweat and sporting multiple welts from the paintballs by the end of the day (though Jake won the "most number of welts sustained in a single volley" award - he got hit by 9 paintballs at one time in the speed round).