Paintball

On Sunday, I had the opportunity to play paintball for the first time in my life.  Adam (my son) is very excited about paintball, so he had asked that his birthday party this year be a paintball game.  He arranged to have nine of his friends, plus me, spend an afternoon playing games at Run-N-Gun Paintball near Oronoco and Mazeppa this past Sunday.

It was such a blast!  We played three games of  "Capture the Flag," three games of "Capture the Fort" and three games of  "Speedball."  (Maybe it was four?)

For those of you who have never played before -- as I had not -- here's how it works. 

The players divide up into two teams.  For "Capture the Flag" and "Speedball" the teams are as even as possible.  For "Capture the Fort" we had three people inside a three-sided fort structure defending it, and the other eight of us attacked. In all games up until the last one, a player is out of the game as soon as he has been marked with a paintball --- the mark must be the size of a quarter coin, but honestly, if you get hit and the paintball breaks, the mark will almost certainly be that big. The team who has the last players in the game wins, essentially.  Sure, in "Capture the Flag" technically you can win by getting the flag to the right place, but the way our players defended the flag, it's hard to imagine a scenario where a player from the losing side would have still been in the game.

The final game was a "Resurrection" game where, as soon as you were hit enough to be "out" you were allowed to return to the starting base and re-enter the game.  In this game, a player wasn't finally out until he had run out of paintballs.

These are two shots of me after the final "Resurrection" game.  I had been hit multiple times in the facemask -- I had to wipe layers of paint off of my visor just to be able to see (poorly) to move.
















A couple of things I learned from playing:

1. I would never survive in a real gun fight.  I don't see the enemy well enough, and shots can seemingly come from nowhere.  I barely fired a round before I was shot out in the first game.
2. Since the best way to avoid being shot is to stay low, crouching is the order of the day, and that means the next day (or two or three for someone my age) my quadriceps were terribly sore.
3. Being able to play a game like this in the woods, with my boys, made me feel so young -- which I'm not, but the feeling was there.  I am so fortunate to be able to live so close to these guys, and I am grateful that they still enjoy playing games with their dad (and father-in-law, and pseudo-dad.)
4. Those paintballs STING!  (I have a couple of welts which will last a while.)