I went to play Laser Tag with my two sons yesterday. We were playing at a small place out of town near where we had been staying for the weekend. We had all played before, but our only experience was at the place near home, and this one was set up differently. But you don’t really get a lot of that information going in.

Apparently noon on Monday isn’t a big Laser Tag time. There were only the three of us and one other group of three who showed up to play. We were set up as two opposing teams in the arena, which sounded like it could be fun as it might be more of a hunt than a blast fest.

As the game started the differences in set up to what we were used to became apparent. Where we usually play, when you are hit, your gun and targets are disabled for 5 seconds. This gives you some palpable yet painless sense of being wounded, and a few seconds to retreat and start again, as the last thing you want to do is stand there so your opponents have lots of time to perfect their aim for when your targets activate again. Instead, this place just scored a hit for your opponent and everything kept right on running.

Our strategy was to try and get position on our opponents and snipe at them from a distance. However, once one of us took our first shot and our position was revealed, the other team did something very surprising. They came right at us. Walking right up so that in many cases we were standing toe-to-toe firing at each other’s sensor targets racking up points. This struck me as desperately un-fun, and downright annoying. In fact a couple of times I nearly got into shoving matches with our opponents because I found myself positionally trapped just standing there trading hits with the other guy for what felt like an eternity.

To avoid this stupidity, it was usually our team that would retreat and try to find cover. But as you were retreating, the other team invariably continued to blast at your sensors and score points. The result being that we lost all the matches to our opponents. However, winning a match would have required us to spend six minutes inside a 5000 sq. ft. room standing 6 inches from a guy and tapping his sensors with your laser while he ticked away at yours hoping that your count was a tad higher.

I’m struggling with this. Not because we lost. (Okay, well… maybe a little.) But I can’t argue that the other team’s strategy was perfectly suited to the way this game was set up. They beat us fair and square. Yet they really sucked much of the fun out of what should have been an enjoyable time. The point of Laser Tag (to me anyway) is to play soldier without all the blood and paperwork. But they weren’t playing for fun, they were playing for points. At the same time, I didn’t really want to counter their strategy as that would make it even less fun for us. So we tried to make the best of it… and lost.

I’m unsure what the takeaway is here. I’d like to be annoyed at the guys we played, but it wasn’t really their fault. I’d like to be annoyed that the shop’s equipment scored the game the way it did, but it isn’t really their fault for failing to meet our expectations. Maybe the lesson is just to not play Laser Tag in strange arenas.