torkell | Pew pew pew

Yesterday evening I met up with Jonners, Paddy, Matt and Neil with the aim of having a pint & meal at a pub followed by a few rounds of pool. That didn't entirely go to plan - after eating at the Lynd Cross we were going to go to the bar underneath the Horsham bowling alley (once upon a time it was the Shelly's nightclub, but they've rebranded since), except it turned out that they'd just been bought or something and so were closed (the guy we spoke to only found out just before his shift started!). So instead we wandered into the bowling alley, and the five of us spontaneously decided to do a round of LaserQuest.

We went for silly names - Neil started it with Penguin (he wanted Warrior Penguin but that was too long), Paddy was Hamster, Jonners chose Monkey, Matt went for Squirrel and I picked Kitten to a round of laughter. After the obligatory briefing where the marshal warned us to obey the rules or else he'd "have to go down to the office, unlock the safe, get the murder weapon, use it, hide the bodies, fill in the paperwork, fill in even more paperwork, then there's the police, courts, judges, ..." it was on to the arena. It was an interesting game - on the one hand the arena's not that large, but on the other there were only five of us and so quite often I'd be wondering where everyone had gone before spotting a glimpse of the lights on someone's pack. We tended to congregate around the right-hand side of the arena (which had plenty of cover), with the firefight occasionally drifting over to the corridor on the other side.

Surprisingly I won by a substantial margin with a score of 703 (not enough to get on the daily leaderboard though) - I put it down to beam spam as my shots fired and accuracy stats show (980 shots, 8% accuracy). Looking at my score sheet Jonners was the designated cannon fodder, while Neil and Paddy gave as good as they got - I kept on coming face-to-face with Paddy in particular, while Neil tended to sneak up on me.

'Twas all good fun, and I must see about arranging another round or two at some point - my last indoor LaserQuest was

talismancer's birthday party a few years ago, and before that I'd have to go back to my time at HTS (Dave and I went to the former Guildford arena several times). There's an arena inside Portsmouth Dockyard, so perhaps I'll try for that with the next DIY Pizza Night... or maybe see if I can get people together for the Horsham one again over Christmas.