On September 20, 2003, Chicago Force had it’s Second Annual Paintball Extravaganza! OK, maybe it wasn’t ‘extravagant’, but it was a great day for paintball. Not too cold, not too hot, nice and sunny.

There was a good turn-out, with 27 people showing up to shoot Hawk…er, to play a rousing game of paintball. And how about those Star Wars scenario games, eh? Boy, we really hyped those didn’t we? That was going to be a lot of fun, we’re a Star Wars group, we’re playing paintball, we should play Star Wars paintball games…

Well, they sucked. I admit it, they didn’t work at all. Not even a little bit. In retrospect, I think I was making the rules too complex, and in the heat of ‘combat’, the fewer rules you have to remember the better. Also, there was a bit of friction with the management (we don’t need to go into that now; it’s a quality field, run by professional people, but everyone has their bad days), and we were only able to try one scenario: the Geonosis Arena. It seemed that the material I chose to make the ‘impenetrable’ Jedi lightsabers out of…well, let’s just say that paintballs went right through it. The armor of the AT-ATs was the same stuff, even if we would have been able to use them. The moral of the story is either keep the rules simple, or stick to tried-and-true paintball games.

That’s not to say that we didn’t have a good time. Everyone that I talked to whole-heartedly gave the day a thumbs up. Blast Camp is a great field, and Nate was an excellent ref. He was able to keep a rowdy group in check and had some great games for us to play.

Most of the post-game talk was along the lines of “Can’t wait until next year!”, and I think it’s safe to say that Chicago Force will be back at Blast Camp on the third weekend of September, 2004. Who knows, we may even drag along some Trekkies to shoot at.

Have I talked enough? You just want to see the pictures already? OK…