October Regional Laser Storm Tournament

The October regional tournament held at Skyway Laser Storm was the perfect event to anchor my trip around. Not only was it ideally timed, but it gave me an opportunity to play again with some friends from the Armageddon tournament. That’s why our team (made up of Gumby, Shel, Woz, Cookie and me) was called the United Order of Armageddon.

As several of us are not what you would call “Storm players” on the regular, it was nice to play alongside more experienced system players. Gumby was no doubt the powerhouse from a competitive standpoint, but he really encouraged Shel to step into the captain’s role and I want to thank both of them for coaching this team into a place where we could hold our own against more seasoned Storm competitors at this event.

Six teams participated in the tournament: Duck, SOS, Ibprofin, UOA, Twitch and Collective Punishment.

The map changes for every tournament, which is a feature unique to Laser Storm arenas built on a grid with barriers suspended from the ceiling rather than a constructed maze that can’t be altered (the way many other laser tag arenas are built).

So we took some time before things started to review the map and have a strategy session.

Our first round was against Team Duck, where we played against Clayton, Logan and company. We won our first game right out of the gate, which was an excellent confidence boost.

We faced all the teams in the round robin games.

We had some very close games! At the end of each round we would return to the energizer and check the final results.

During the break before the elimination round we enjoyed checking out some cool history at the site. I was certainly delighted about the Stargate.

And it has been very rewarding to see people taking interest in the traveling museum collection items I brought for a mobile display exhibit.

This Laser Tag Museum Collection display includes many vintage items related to the history of the head game with systems that utilized helmets, headsets and head sensors. This exhibit includes a few traditional laser tag examples from approximately the first the first decade of the game.

I took this as my chance to take a photo with two rarities. Here I am holding the prototype black StarLyte Pro. Getting a photo with both the StarLyte and the Stargate would be an especially rare opportunity!

Due to time, it was decided that we would do a single elimination rather than a double elimination.

We were in the first game and it was incredibly close! Even though this took us out of the finals early, I was really pleased that the score was as close as it was and that we kept so close all throughout this game. If we were going to be eliminated, at least we went out strong!

Final placements were as follows…

1st - Collective Punishment (well earned!)

2nd - Twitch

3rd - Duck/SOS

Third place was a bit of a “who’s left standing?” kind of thing, but I was glad to see the custom awards before I left. Notice a theme developing here?