One of the most important things I need to do in preparing for hosting Lazer Tag games at the City of Auburn 4th of July Festival is to create portable barriers so that the players have something to hide behind. Such a thing will be useful for all my games, but will be especially necessary for the games in July.
The park that the festival happens at is a really nice park. It has a walking path, a water spray park for the kids to get wet in during hot days, soccer fields, baseball fields, and an enormous area that’s just a nice grassy place with sporadic trees to find shade under. Most of these areas will be taken with other things on the 4th of July, though. The City found a nice spot for me to have my games. It has plenty of room, but it’s completely flat and has no cover except a few trees at the boundaries. I’ll be using the trees to hold up the caution tape for the boundary demarcation, so I need something for the kids to hide behind.
Fortunately, a solution was already available to me, and was well tested. My Internet friend Peter Rossi, who helps his wife run her mobile tag party business in Maryland called TagParty, had already designed a great, lightweight, and durable portable barrier system using Coroplast sheets. You can see them in his TagParty Photo Gallery. They are deceptively simple, but ingeniously designed. They are light, stable, quick to deploy, can be staked down in case of wind, and will flatten nicely for transport, and in case of collision from a player. He runs water tag at his parties during the warm months, but the climate of this area means that the water resistance of these barriers will be a benefit to me as well.
To make these barriers, I need 3 pieces of 3’x4′ Coroplast for each barrier. For 25 barriers, that’s 75 sheets! To get that many, I’m buying 4×8′ sheets and having them cut for me. This is where the disappearing money comes into play. The grand total after cutting charge and taxes brings my materials for just the walls of the barriers to $433. It might sound like a lot, but for the same number of barriers in any other design, I’d be paying much more. I still need to purchase zip ties, grommets, and velcro to fully assemble them into the nifty quick-deploying barriers Peter designed, though.
Tune in next time when shopping is complete, and it’s time to start building the barriers. I’ll probably even put some pics in here somewhere… somehow…
Here is another kid running into a barrier at a TagParty. http://www.tagparty.net/tagparty_photo/070422_jordan/P1000052.jpg
No harm done to kid or barrier.
[…] laser tag games at the Auburn Parks 4th of July Festival this year. Fortunately for me, most of the preparations needed were done last year, and do not need to be done again. There are a few things I need to […]