Battleball is a crazy fusion of football and our characteristic lasertag on steroids. In many ways Battleball is a fusion of many other games, including Bulldog, VIP Escort, Bomb the Base and Team Deathmatch. As you can imagine it’s crazy fun and it doesn’t matter whether you like or even understand American football. Battleball was conceived by another field owner, but Mike wrote the final rules for it. Battleball was debuted by multiple fields across the US for the first time on January 31, 2009.

Strategy and Tactics:

• Winning requires moving the battleball from your end of the field to the far end of the field, into the opponents’ endzone. Since only one player on your team can carry the battleball you obviously need to protect them. On the bright side, though, the defending team is unlikely to send out much in the way of a hunter team to kill your carrier.
• If you’re defending focus on making every step farther down the field more painful for the offense team. You don’t have to kill them off by the midfield, just before they get to the endzone. So to this end try to whittle down their health progressively. Make sure you’ve got defenders starting near their starting point and as they progress just concentrate your forces as much as possible. Ideally they’ll have been taking damage and will start to run out of respawns by the time they get to the endzone, making them more cautious, slower, and easier to ambush and stop.
• When you’re on offense the most valuable thing on the field (besides your ball carrier) is information. You need stealthy players to survey the field, identify where the defense has placed themselves, and figure out how you’re going to escort the ball carrier down the field.
• As the ball carrier you might have more health, but you only have one hand since you’re carrying the battleball. You should focus on stealth and keeping your head down, though don’t forget that you DO still have a laser tag gun. In a pinch you should feel free to use it. You won’t have any chance of hitting, though, if you don’t use the scope, especially since you’ve got to be holding onto the battleball the whole time. Use the ball to help support the front of your gun.

One team has a VIP that needs to pass through several waypoints. The other team wants to eliminate the VIP. As ambushers die they become a pursuit force that keeps the VIP escorts from lagging. VIP escorts are very challenging games that force the escort team to handle a very large number of challenges at the same time, not the least of which is maintaining a reliable chain of command.

Strategy and Tactics:

• As the escort team you have a thousand things to juggle: movement of the VIP, advance scouting for the VIP’s path, protection of the VIP, counterambushing hunters, locating waypoints, and searching for the extraction point, among other things. Escort is VERY hard.
• As the hunter team you have two things to do: run a LOT and kill the VIP. It’s relatively easy to kill the VIP and even eliminate the escorts. The key is to keep the pressure on them as much and as long as possible. Eventually, they’ll likely trip up and end up delivering the VIP to you on a platter. In the mean time, you need to run, shoot, die, and run again. Hunting is VERY tiring, but usually profitable.
• The VIP almost always has a highly visible costume piece, whether that’s an orange hat or vest, large object to carry, etc. If you’re on the escort team try to keep the VIP down and hidden as much as possible whenever you aren’t moving them. As the hunters, make sure you know what you’re looking for and how high above the ground you expect it to be.
• On escort, the best weapon you have against the hunters is fatigue. They have to run a LOT. If you have a choice between moving the VIP and staying put and both choices are equally dangerous always move. It’s probable that the hunter respawn point will slowly move towards you over the course of the game, so the longer you sit the less the hunters will need to run and the easier time they’ll have overrunning you.
• If you’re protecting the VIP you shouldn’t be standing next to them. You are not a bullet magnet when you’re guarding the VIP in the same way you would be in any other game. Any hunter who sees you and sees the VIP is going to shoot first at the VIP. For this reason, make sure that you’re controlling a wide perimeter around the VIP. …and since the laser tag guns shoot several hundred feet, the smallest your perimeter should probably be is a 50′ radius circle and more is better. If you need to cheat a little on coverage cheat by leaving openings towards the front. Since you’ve got scouts searching for the path forward and looking for ambushes you’re less likely to come under fire from that direction. Also, the closer you can be moving to the edge of the battlefield the less likely you’ll come under fire from that direction, too.
• The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. The safest path is almost certainly much, much longer.
• If you are the VIP, make sure that someone on your protective crew is always aware of where you are and trying to figure out where you should be going next. This is important because the safest position for you to be in is most likely laying down as flat and low on the ground as possible. If your team loses track of where you are they’ll start freaking out and yelling to one another to figure out where you are. This is going to tell the hunters (who will have heard the yelling) where to start looking for you.
• Do not expect to win this game as the escort team the first time you play it. Don’t expect to win the second time, either. This game is not unbalanced in favor of the hunters, but the skills required to keep the VIP alive and moving are really, really challenging and escorting doesn’t give you many second chances.

You’re familiar with the basic game. Imagine how much tougher and more intense this game gets when you can be tagged from a football field away! Play a two-flag game with a flag at each team’s base or play a one-flag game with a neutral flag in the middle that needs to be retrieved. Either way, you’re guaranteed to be challenged.

Strategy and Tactics:

• You have to balance a number of factors in CtF, including knowing where the flag is currently located and working as a team to move it up the field. If the other team has the flag then it is often easiest to spread out the team so you can locate it and then whoever finds it can shout out where the flag carrier is. If your team has it, however, you probably want to group up on the carrier to provide protection.
• If you’re protecting a flag carrier then you’ll probably want assault players in front of them and some flank players to keep your carrier from getting surrounded. As long as you’re moving fairly quickly you probably don’t need to worry about rear guards, especially if at least one or two flank players are slightly behind the group.