Your team is assembled. Three or more of your finest. You check your designator lights to insure that you are all set to the same frequency and synchronize your timers. Your team leader makes the xenon strobe active, indicating team initiative. Your team spreads out, looking intently for designator lights of the enemy. With stealthy approach and careful aim, you and your team sprint for the xenon strobe on the enemy turf, hoping to bring it back intact, securing peace for the galaxy...
Capture the Flasher
Our usual game is referred to as "Capture the Flasher." Unlike Capture the Flag, which uses flags that ordinarily cannot be seen from across the park at night, we use some flashing rods of our own construction.
The players are split up into two teams (we have found four to a team to be a good minimum), each with a flasher, and they are sent off to find a home base. Once the flashers are turned on at the home bases, the game begins. The object is to capture the other team's flasher and return with it to your own home base. Strategy and tactics must be used to maintain an appropriate guard on your flasher while allowing for an offensive assault against the other team's base. Remember that each person has six shots before he or she dies, so just hitting them once doesn't prevent them from continuing an assault. If a person is killed while running for their home base with the flasher, the flasher must be placed there and remains there until the end of the game or another team member from the opposing team recovers it and runs for their base. Games are limited to fifteen minutes in order to avoid long, boring stand-offs.
Free for All
In a free-for-all, there are two objectives: kill everybody else or get the flasher back to your home base. This one is dangerously tedious. So far, the best strategy has been to wait quietly for everone to kill everybody else off, then go for the flasher. The problem here is that you can never be sure when everybody else is dead. Sometimes we use more than one flasher. Sometimes we allow alliances between individuals. We always allow traitorism in a free-for-all.
Hunter
Since these pages have been posted, I have been asked about a game variation for an odd number of players. Well, it just so happened that I was sent mail by Craig Silverstein, of Team Rooftops from Birmingham and Ann Arbor, Michigan. (He sent me a wonderful story I'm including in the Tales of the Infradead.) They play a "Hunter" version of the game. The hunted person has his/her gun set to fully automatic with wide beam. The hunters have their guns set to single shot mode with narrow beam.
We've had to add some general rules as we played. Sometimes, particularly when running, the guns have a tendency to reset (a fault in the battery pack- a solution can be found on the Modifications page).
- If your gun resets, take yourself out of the game.
- Don't go vertical.
- Don't violate public property.
- The park closes at 11:00 PM. (Peanut knows a lot about this one.)
- If injured, yell "MEDIC!" The phrase "Help me, guys" just doesn't work.
- Dead men do not talk. They return silently to the graveyard and wait for the next game.
The most important thing is to have fun, but be careful.
All material © 1997 Chaos Enterprises, Inc.