So, how did it go?

Yesterday…The 4th of July Festival at the park where I hosted free lazer tag games… Yesterday was fantastic. I am deeply thankful for all my wonderful helpers, not the least of which being my wife, Ingrid, and my co-host, Tod. Along with long-time club member and a good friend, Clay, and his family, we had the entire area set up an hour before the deadline, barely 30 minutes after we got started at 9. Since we all knew what to do, we got right to it, and it all went up smoothly and quickly. We ended up sitting around chatting for over an hour, waiting for the actual event to begin at 11am. 🙂

Click here for the photo gallery of over 100 pictures.

And check out this YouTube video of some of the gaming:

The Good:

• The set up was perfect
• The signs were informative… when people read them. 😉
• The weather was great (i.e. no rain ;-), but very warm
• The turnout was just about perfect. We rarely had to make more than a few people wait for the next game, but we still had plenty of people for each game.
• Hosting went off without a hitch for the most part. I used Peter’s technique of having the taggers facing out so that I could see the screens and press the buttons from the center of the hosting station, then turning them around as they joined. This worked wonderfully.
• The Respawn game worked well. Some of the kids took a minute to cotton onto the concept of returning to base to get back in the game, but most of the confusion when that happened was that they didn’t realize it was pretty much instant, or that NEUT didn’t mean they were completely OUT. The game had the kids moving, and that was part of the plan. 🙂

The Bad:

• The weather was HOT. I mean, it was nice for the day, but there was very little shade in the play area we had. Most of my time was spent in the shade of the hosting canopy, but I did play a few games, and go out to take video and photos, but I felt sorry for the people in line, and my helpers who spent more time in the beating sun.
• We had a few battery jiggle malfunctions, but not as many as I expected.
• We also had a couple brain farts on my part, as I joined a couple in the wrong order a few times (no biggie) and completely forgot to join the last tagger in once.
• The tagger racks swung too much. I pinned the chains down to reduce that, but I either didn’t do it tight enough, I or didn’t work well enough. The players would always grab them and run, causing the remaining taggers to swing and often fall off the rack. They also had a tendency to put them back on the racks wrong, but I guess there’s little that can be done about that other than helping them put them back. Also, any sharp bump to one of the ends of a rack would often cause them all to tumble down to the ground. Once, it was my fault (before games had started), but more than once, other people (usually my kids) bumped them when going in or out of the tents. Fortunately, the LTTO taggers are very sturdy, and suffered no damage from their falls.
• The worst was the debriefing problems. I went ahead and had Tod swap batteries on a couple that seemed to be having more problems than the others, but the problems were otherwise pretty random. We would have a debrief with 4 or more non-reporting players one game, and then a flawless debrief the next. It was inexplicable, and for that reason, quite annoying. I remembered Peter mentioning that he found that if the kids caused the taggers to “Overheat” from rapid firing a lot, that could cause debriefing problems. But not only could we not MAKE it happen on purpose, but we warned a few groups of players, many were teens and so could understand what we meant, and who avoided it, but still had their tagger not want to respond to debriefing. If there was a sure-fire solution to this, I would love to hear it for the next time. Any player that had technical difficulty of any kind, including failure to debrief, was allowed to go to the front of the line for the next game.

The Ugly

• There was no ugly. Ok, well maybe some of the patrons weren’t that pretty, but I’m sure they were beautiful on the inside. 😉

Would I do it all again? Yep! I asked Ingrid to estimate the number of people that came and played, and she figures we had a good 100 or so people all told. This was not nearly the number of people at the Festival, but we were kind of tucked away from all the other action. We even had a friend come by that said she was looking for us for a while, and finally found us. If we do this festival again, I’ll try to get another spot, ‘cus I’m sure if people who KNEW we were there couldn’t find us, that there were plenty who would have played if they saw us running games anywhere near where the rest of the activities were happening. But, in the end, it’s all good. We had good turnout, and spread the word of tag to many new players yesterday, many of which took flyers about the ALTC, and many of them were very excited to come to future games. If we get 10 more regular players, it will have been worth it.

Speaking of the people, we even had the Parks Director (i.e. the Director of Parks and Recreation for City of Auburn) come and play a game with his teenaged boys. Check him out. We also had a visit from the Mayor of Pacific, one of Auburn’s neighboring towns, inviting us to host games at their “Pacific Days” event in two weeks. Unfortunately, that’s the weekend that I’ll be running CybCon, my Transformers fan convention in Tacoma, so that’s a no-can-do. But, we’ll give it some thought for next year.

Overall, the event was a success. Now we get to see if our attendance at regular games increases. 🙂