The Best Way to Play Laser Tag

So on Saturday my day was pretty much packed. I had an art class at one thirty, which is pretty normal, but I have to take the train to get to it—actually, I have to walk two miles to the train station and then take the train to get to it. Then within the first five minutes of the class I managed to stab myself in the face with a pencil and it frickin’ hurt. See, I’d just sharpened the pencil and I was trying to get some stray pencil shavings off of the sharpener when the pencil, which was still in my hand, flew up and gouged me in the face. It actually drew blood.

Anyway, after I stopped bleeding I did some art and then I left the class early to go to a LASER TAG PARTY! Yaay!

I get to the place and it’s like the one time in my life when I’m not the last one to arrive at the party. Seriously, I have a problem with being late for things.

We waited for everyone to arrive and then we waited some more in the MASSIVE LINE—seriously, it was huge—and then we went in and shot each other with lasers and stuff. 

If you've never played laser tag, here's how it works: There are three teams, red, blue and green. Each person wears a vest that has lights of their team's color and a laser gun attached. There's a big indoor structure with lots of walls and passages, and you run around and shoot people from other teams. If you get shot, your vest turns white and you can't shoot anything for a few seconds. Each team has a base, and if you take out another team's base by shooting it four times, you get like two thousand points. The same person can't take out a base twice.

My friends and I were taking up both the blue and the green spaces and we were going to make an alliance, but apparently that went straight out the window as soon as we got inside.

I was on the blue team and I had NO idea what I was doing. I’m just running around shooting anything that isn’t blue. Actually, I shot some of the blue people as well, but luckily friendly fire doesn’t register on the vests so I couldn’t actually get them out.

My team won and I was happy. I wound up getting ranked number sixteen! (Out of something like thirty, so yay.) So we waited for like another forty minutes to get in again—actually, we got shut out twice because apparently my friends operate on an “If all of us can’t go in NONE of us are going in!” basis and I love them SO MUCH for it.

Then when we finally got in again, we were all supposed to be blue. But they ran out of blue vests so I wound up as green.

Here’s the best way to play laser tag: Against your friends, having heard their strategies, and with a rigged vest.

Seriously, there was something off with my vest. It only registered, like, one out of five times I got shot. I found the red base pretty fast—it was totally unguarded!—and took it out, then got someone else on my team to take it out again before moving on to the blue base (which belonged to my friends). I took that one out too. Then I found my own base, the green one, and stopped some of my friends from taking it out. I shot them all and then just kept shooting so that every time one of their vests reactivated I got it again immediately.

That’s when my friend Sally, who is an expert at laser tag, noticed that there was something up with my vest. I didn’t believe her, since people had been getting me out (infrequently), so I let her shoot me a few times until my vest turned white. It took several shots, though, so after the game was over I asked the Game Master about it.

Her response? “Oh yeah, some of the vests have power-ups, especially if you take out a base. Like they just don’t register as many hits.”

So yep. I had a rigged vest.

AND I got ranked NUMBER ONE! Woo! It was fabulous!

That was a fun day. The rest of the week, not so much. Lots of homework, and I'm doing cello for the school's production of Evita, so lots of rehearsal for that too. I don't actually know the story of Evita yet, but I'm sure I'll pick it up eventually.