A Laserforce to be Reckoned with in Carmichael

One of my Armageddon teammates, Ziggy, lives close to Sacramento, so when I told him I was making this trip he was enthusiastic to come out to meet me at Laser Tag of Carmichael, the Laserforce site where some of my friends from Syracuse had recently played in the Laserforce Nats. I was really excited to play at this site for that reason and also to see my teammate again.

I arrived a little ahead of schedule. The manager, Ian, took my member card from Syracuse and used my number to sign me in so I could earn achievements during the night including the “play at another site” achievement…but as you can imagine I already have that one checked off. Although there was an overnight lock-in scheduled to start at midnight Ziggy had brought his friend Anne to join us and play for a couple of hours before that got started (after a full day of travel I decided to skip the overnight games and just play until 11:00pm instead). Ziggy had not been there since the place remodeled, so we both got a tour of the facility before joining the games for the night. The space is perfect for SM5 and Ian showed us some of the best locations for strategic game play. Of course I also love to see an artistic arena (which has nothing to do with playability, but I really appreciated seeing the thought that went into their castle aesthetic.

There were five base targets located throughout the arena. I did my best to memorize where they were, but to be honest I was only certain about the location of three of them.

After a couple of standard team games we mixed it up a bit. One game I had never actually played before was simply called “Tag”. When one guy asked me if I wanted to play tag my first thought was “um, yeah, that’s what I’m here for”, but he meant this specific game that makes one person “it” and their goal is to tag other players to pass along (aka “get rid of”) the state of being “it”. That was fun and a little different. Then there was the game of “Colors” which was also new to me. While I thought I had played almost all the special games at my home sites these two were unfamiliar. Well, this is a great example of why I love to play at a variety of locations because for as much tag as I think I have already experienced there are constantly new variations and different things to try. I had a great time in Carmichael and getting to hang out with my friend again as we both agree that half the reason we play tag is meeting great people who enjoy it as much as we do!