Paintball Basics

Paintball isn't the sport for everyone. It's mostly a guy thing and you've got to have a certain acceptance of pain.  Yeah, it's going to hurt.  Plus something's got to appeal to you about sneaking around and pretend offing other people.  It's a whole lot better though than having to do the real thing. War is not nice.

Paintball guns are often called markers for historical reasons. They were originally used. mostly by farmers and foresters, to mark trees and cattle.  They weren't real accurate and didn't have much range. Today's paintball guns are much more accurate and have longer ranges.  They use CO2 cartridges to shoot a gelatin capsule about the size of a marble that's filled with a colored polyethylene glycol paint.

Evidently the first name applied to this oddball sport was "The National Survival Game."  The early version was usually an 'every man for himself' melee.  As the game developed it got more sophisticated and a number of variations have developed.  A couple are based on 'Capture the Flag' type games with intrusions from military war game training exercises.

The two flag version requires capturing the enemy flag and protecting your own - or eliminating all your enemies depending on what rules govern eliminations/resurrections.  Once captured the flag usually needs to be hung in a specified location usually your base but not always.  The Center Flag version uses a single flag which needs to be captured and brought to the enemies base.

Elimination - kill off all the enemy who are dead when hit. Victory goes to the surviving team.

Resurrection: Yeah - live again by returning to the base camp. Could this maybe get tedious and drag things out a lot?

Now here is the baddest of all: "just Plain Crazy" (also known as the Hardcore Last Man Standing or OK Corral variation).  Everybody gets all together - and this can be done as teams or as individuals - and blasts away at each other. Nobody gets eliminated. Players take themselves out if they run out of gas or paintballs - or,  more often,  if they get tired of the pain.  Getting whacked over and over by those paintballs at close range can get real unpleasant for even the most determined macho masochist.

Did you guess that that last paintball variation is the least often played?  It's a little on the violent side. Real war is even less fun since you can get dead for real or maybe just hideously mangled.

Eventually there'll be some more on paintball - maybe paintball equipment and clothes, a look at paintball styles. Whatever.