Tag Archives: games

Food

So You Want to Throw a Dinner Party

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My friends and I are entering the period of our lives where we have spaces with significant others, few to no roommates, and the horrible decision of owning a dining table for more than three people and a pile of books. Dinner for two or four isn’t such a big hassle, but when everyone wants to come over, eat, drink, and play games it can start to get out of hand.

The Guests

How many of your friends can you comfortably seat? Whether it’s around your dining table or apartment, it’s better to be able to provide a chair so that everyone can eat at the same time. Are these people who will get along? Will they hover in the kitchen? Consider who makes a great guest for eating—they’re not always the same people you want to have over for drinks or dancing. Keep the number of guests reasonable for noise too. It can be hard to yell over people, and too many people can make that a challenge. Start small!

The Table

Put all your leaves in. Adding the extra space in later for plates, napkins, glasses, platters of food, finished plates, and assorted elbows will be a godsend when you’re in the middle of cooking and entertaining. My boyfriend and I like placemats, as they’re easy to clean (throw them in the wash with your clothes), and they give a visual space for where everyone should sit and put all their eating crap. Set out dishes in advance too, along with flatware and glasses. It’s nice to not have to scramble for everything at the last second, or have to direct guests where to get their utensils and plates while you’re finishing up the meal. I like to not assign seats, because two of your guests might be having a great conversation that you would’ve never considered, and now they want to talk all night about it (but no one else does).

The Food

What’s easy for you to make? Can you do a lot of it? Sometimes I get into the trap of thinking that Dish A would go really well with Dish B, with a side of Dish C. But all of these plates are hard work or require recipes I’ve never really done before—and when everyone is waiting for their food, scrambling to make sure that your food is edible (and hopefully tasty) is probably the worst thing to worry about. So, keep it small and easy! I’m guilty of generally not following this on a day-to-day basis: I like to look up recipes that sound delicious, try to make it for a few people, and fail miserably. When I’m going to entertain, I definitely try to keep it simple.

Start with an appetizer that takes a very little preparation, maybe something you can do in the morning or the night before. Salads are an easy choice: throw some mixed greens with a relatively neutral dressing or even serve the dressing on the side. Add tomatoes, fresh fruit slices, or nuts to add texture to the salad. Alternatively, soups are easy to make earlier in the day or the night before. Just bring it up to simmer and serve hot with some fresh bread. If either of these is too much work, you can always settle with a cheese platter—put some bricks of cheese on a wooden cutting board with some knives and crackers, maybe a few slices of cured meats. Personally, I like crostini types of snacks. Get a nice baguette and slice it into thin rounds. Brush with olive oil or butter and toast in your oven until crispy. Top with a bit of cheese, or meat, or a spread of your choice. A bit of smoked salmon, herb cream cheese, and a sprinkle of chives makes it perfect for me.

As for the entree, what’s good for everyone? Ignoring dietary restrictions, fish and chicken are pretty easy to just throw in the oven, pull it out, and serve when it’s time. I like to go with a recipe that’s pretty heavy on the aromatics, but it’s not for everyone! To me, lots of garlic, onions, and herbs help to make a kitchen feel homey, and there’s nothing quite like opening the oven door and hearing everyone groan with anticipation. For a bit more of an active cooking experience, you can always grill or pan-fry your main course—this is more along the lines of what I generally do. Sear some steaks in a pan or a grill and top it with butter, or work to build a more nuanced dish like chicken marsala (a personal favorite). Either way, I’d aim to do about one large serving per person, with extras for the folks you know who like to have extras (mostly me), and you’re set!

But wait! Side dishes? Make them in advance if you can. Or have them be as very little maintenance if possible. Salads if you didn’t have one for an appetizer are great here, as are various potato preparations: mashed, baked, and gratin are fantastic ways to serve a side starch. If your entree is pretty heavy, keep your side relatively light! And vice versa. You want everyone to have room for dessert, of course.

After everyone’s done with their main course and has been settled for a bit, I like to bring out dessert. Unless you’re into baking and pastries, I’d definitely grab a cake or a few pastries from your favorite bakery. It’s a lot of work to make your own desserts, and the precision can be taxing when you consider that you’ve made so many other things for this party (even if you didn’t do it all yourself). Something easy to cut like a pie or a cake works well for dessert, especially if it highlights seasonal fruit. Ice cream and coffee are also fantastic and absurdly simple. Carve out a couple scoops and serve with a small cup of joe.

The Drinks

While we’re talking about beverages, what do you serve for the rest of the dinner? It really depends on your crowd and your personal tastes. We have a stocked wine rack and a decent amount of hard liquor, so it’s easy for our guests to have whatever they’re feeling like imbibing.

I’m a bit of a wine snob (I’m sorry), and it’s nice to have a general progression of lighter wines to bolder ones as the meal goes on. A rosé is a good halfway point for avid white and red wine drinkers, and generally fits nicely for an appetizer into a main course. Aiming for bold reds through the entrée typically works best, unless you’re serving white-fleshed fish or lighter chicken preparations.

This being said, serve whatever wine you think tastes best! It’s the expectation that you serve white wine with fish and chicken, but no one is stopping you from having lovely glass of gewürztraminer with a steak or a fantastic glass of pinot noir with halibut.

If your guests are into cocktails or straight liquor, it’s nice to have some glasses available and some ice on hand for said drinks. I urge guests to keep it simple. We’re not in a bar, and I won’t have slices of lemon, lime, or orange, or mint or basil leaves on hand just because you want a specific cocktail. I generally assume that if someone is drinking a specific boozy drink, they’ll be drinking it all night. I treat beer the same way: have a small selection of beers you know people like, and if they’re drinking it, odds are that they’ll drink it all night.

It’s also great to have some non-alcoholic, non-water drinks on hand for designated drivers, guests with allergies, or generally otherwise opposed to liquor. Sparkling juices and seltzers can be nice alternatives to soft drinks, and they’re tasty too. Water should also be readily available, for cleansing the palate and sating thirst (I keep a Brita in the fridge for this purpose).

Whatever Comes After…

Is whatever you want! Some dinner parties end with the end of dessert, and others go on to play games, watch TV or movies, and whatever else you and your friends do. It’s probably better to avoid any strenuous activities right after all that food, though. I personally insist on cleaning up after myself—my guests are just that, guests. But if they’re insistent and you’re tired, might as well take advantage of the free labor!

Don’t stress out (unless you like it), and try to have fun! Your guests will have a good time if you are, and it’s not worth it to go crazy over a night of cooking (and drinking). You can always clean up tomorrow, eat the leftovers and relax after everyone’s gone. Good luck!

Photo by Meaghan Morrison

Photo by Meaghan Morrison

Career

Finding My Way into Game Design: Education After Graduation

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Choosing a career path can be difficult for many students. You want to find something that will financially support you, while meeting your own personal goals, and doing something that fulfills and entertains you. My own search for a career has continued past my college education, and I found myself searching for other growth opportunities to really pinpoint what I want to do.

So where does game design fit into all of this? When I completed my Bachelor’s degree, it was in Pictorial Art with an emphasis on Studio Practice. It’s a pretty general degree for art students, where your specialty really comes down to what you choose to study. I had a fairly well-rounded education, jumping between animation, illustration, traditional art, digital art, and graphic design. My dilemma was, how do I put all of these skills to use in the real world?

My eventual decision was to further my education, so I began to research post-degree programs, such as certificates and two-year degrees. I also researched different career paths that would complement the skills I already had. I decided that any new education I pursued had to be something new that would build off of what I had already learned. The answer: game design!

I found a certificate program through Post University that would have a focus on the basics of game design, game programming, and some animation. Game design is still a relatively new subject with degree and certificate offerings, so it felt like a good opportunity to expand my skills in an emerging field of study. Probably the most important class I took was the Programming for Game Design course. It began with a basic intro to programming, focusing on C++, and led into the basics of game engines and how programming fits into graphics.

It was a fairly short program, but it gave me access to a lot of good resources that I wouldn’t have known about otherwise. The most useful were the game engines we worked with: simple engines, such as the App Game Kit and the Dark Game Development Kit. These are both fairly cheap engines provided by TheGameCreators.com. They are beneficial for someone who is new to programming or game design, and serve to ease new designers into the game development world. Beyond the scope of our actual class projects, I was advised to look into the Unreal Development Kit to learn more professional game development. The UDK 3 is free to download and use for anyone (however, licensing fees apply if you want to sell something). Recently, I acquired the Unreal 4 beta, which drastically improves many of the Unreal features; however, it requires a monthly fee, unlike the UDK.

A lot of the learning process was self-driven, such as working on my own projects beyond the scope of the class. I spent most of my time playing around with building maps in UDK. Working in the UDK, you have a choice between hand-coding minor details, or designing in a more what-you-see-is-what-you-get mode, which makes it probably the most robust engine available, and the fourth edition builds on these principles further. Here is a video exploring a partial level I have been working on:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1Iq4CAgYFs

Finding an industry that I enjoy as a consumer as well as a professional helped drive my projects as well. Good game designers make great games because they enjoy playing great games themselves. Going behind the scenes and seeing the raw elements of game design is like getting the best cheat codes available, and I think this is the type of fascination that one should strive for in any industry. If you love what you do or make, it will be that much more exciting and meaningful to make it your career.

Whether you’re interested in getting into a particular industry or just want to learn new skills, there are always opportunities for further education. If a set program is out of your budget, community colleges offer a lot of similar classes as well, or you can check out Coursera or Codecademy to learn from videos at your own pace. At the end of the day, it’s more about the knowledge and skills you gain than the degree or certificate you might receive.

Always make it a goal to never stop educating yourself!

Photo by Andy Sutterfield

Photo by Andy Sutterfield

Geekery

Let’s Ask: A D&D Dungeon Master

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Two nerds walk into a Starbucks with a couple mutual friends, and soon discovered a mutual interest in D&D. Meggyn, ever-recruiting managing editor of the UNDERenlightened, roped Steve into sitting down with her to share some experiences and answer some questions about organizing and running a D&D game as a Dungeon Master.

Meggyn: How did you get into D&D?

Steve: I’m not really sure what drew my eye to it, but in 6th grade I was in a hobby shop and saw the player’s handbook for version 3.0. I researched some stuff online, and read some stories of fun adventures and became a lot more interested. After that, I talked to a couple of friends about trying the game out, so we went out and bought the stuff we needed to get a start. Because none of us had any clue what we were doing, one of the group members bought a D&D starter kit, which came with a few prefabricated adventures, which were just enough to get a practical handle on the mechanics of the game. From there, we continued to play and create our own adventures.

Meggyn: That’s awesome that you all learned the mechanics of the game together. When I first started, I joined a new campaign with mostly all experienced players; to this day I’m still a total newbie, so I still rely a lot on my friends for advice on leveling my character and how to figure out adventures. Have you always played with friends, or have you ever started a campaign with complete strangers?

Steve: I’ve never played an in-person campaign with complete strangers, but I have joined groups of people online that I didn’t know, as well as online groups of friends I met in an MMO. When I joined the former group, the one full of total strangers, I met them through a “looking for group” forum on the RPTools website. There are a ton of places online to find groups over the internet.

Meggyn: Dungeons & Dragons has been around for decades, so there are a few different versions of the rulebooks.

Steve: Yep. For those who don’t know, each revision is a major overhaul of the rules, where they are essentially rewritten (not dissimilar to new versions of video games, when the entire engine is recreated). From there, minor updates come in the form of supplemental or expansion books, which can include anything from new classes to new game mechanics (kind of like expansion packs).

Meggyn: When I played my first D&D campaign, we used a more recent version that included the well-known table grid, for moving miniatures around.  However, my current campaign has reverted all the way back to the first edition: it works well for us because we can simply play through ongoing storytelling (perfect for a group of mostly English majors), and we rely on our Dungeon Master’s common sense rather than burdening our play with overly technical details, like counting out the exact amount of squares we can move.  What’s your favorite version for organizing as the Dungeon Master?

Steve: There are some cool features to every version that I have played, really. But my favorite version of Dungeons & Dragons is a variant of the version 3.5 rule set called Pathfinder, because the power adjustment of specific classes is better as they level and the mechanics remain almost unaltered. This gives a stronger incentive for players to specialize in just one class and makes it easier as a DM to keep track of the characters abilities, which is very important for planning adventures. This coupled with my familiarity with the version 3.5/Pathfinder mechanics, and the huge number of supplemental materials available to draw upon, allow for much smoother game play and planning.

Meggyn: So it sounds like you started from the very beginning as the Dungeon Master for your in-person games with your friends.  How do you prepare for a session, and what are some pitfalls you consciously avoid?

Steve: Well, back when my first group started, we actually traded off hosting the prefabricated adventures since running prefabricated campaigns takes a lot less preparation. I DMed for the first time without a prefabricated campaign back in high school: I was terrible, and it has been a process of getting better this whole time. A great deal of time spent preparing is time spent trying to avoid some of the mistakes I made on my first pass as the DM. One common thing I avoid is creating an adventure where the players are bound to just one path, but also to where I don’t need to create the limitless possibilities of a completely open world. That is probably the hardest part of being a DM. Another thing is how to ensure the encounters are challenging but possible for the players, which requires a lot of thought into each character’s abilities. The rest of the prep time as a DM is used to draw maps, organize my system of keeping track of turns, and further familiarize myself with what monsters I am presenting in the encounters.

Meggyn: Sometimes the complication of a crazy open world can simply be impossible to avoid, though.  In my current campaign, one of our players decided from the get-go that he wanted to buy a chicken.  Since then, he has goaded our ranger into training it (as much as you can train a chicken), and is constantly coming up with absolutely insane, totally creative, and utterly hilarious ways to harass our long-suffering DM—like his current search for chicken-sized armor.  Any similarly great stories from your past campaigns?

Steve: The problem is that most D&D anecdotes draw on previous stories or adventures, and are most fun from experiencing them, kind of like an inside joke. To me at least, the most fun from the game comes from the people incorporating their own personalities into the events of the game.

Meggyn: It really is an awesome pastime.  So, for the readers whom we’ve inspired, what are some good resources for getting started with D&D?

Steve: A great tool to use for running a D&D game, online or otherwise, is Maptool, a completely free product of RPTools that is great for creating encounter maps and running games. Another great resource for version 3.5 is the d20srd, which is a free online searchable rules resource. If you navigate around, you can find some cool tools and setups that other people have used in their gaming, like the group who projected their game mat onto a table using map tools. Of course, you can always search your app store and see if there are some nifty tools there.

Steven Cary is an aspiring IT professional who enjoys backpacking, archery, cars, and science fiction/fantasy.

Meggyn Watkins is the Managing Editor of the UNDERenlightened. Fiction reader, local art prowler, concert-goer, BBC watcher, world traveler, and San Jose Sharks lover! @meggawat

Photo by Meggyn Watkins

Photo by Meggyn Watkins

Geekery, Sports

Girl, What’s Your Fan-ta-ta-sy? An Introduction to Fantasy Football

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In November, the refresh button on my iPhone never sees more action than it does on Sundays, which can only mean one thing: I have a fantasy football team, and it’s almost playoff time, bitches.

I grew up watching (and enjoying) football in a Giants-loyal family. Even when I was living abroad, I would stay up until 2:30 am to watch the Sunday afternoon games—although I drew the line at the 8 pm games. In college, I agreed to join a friend’s fantasy football team, but I mostly forgot about it, and by mid-season, I had conceded the bottom position for my team, the New York Sandwiches.

Let’s briefly pause and try and define the complex she-beast of a hobby that is Fantasy Football. And by that I mean let’s all visit its Wikipedia page, which concisely defines FF as “an interactive competition in which users compete against each other as general managers of virtual teams built from real [NFL] players.” Essentially, in a private league of usually 10-14ish people, each participant, or “owner,” builds a team of NFL players, whose real-life performances on a given Football Sunday (or Thursday night, or Monday night) are converted using a standardized scoring system into Fantasy points for the Fantasy Team that that player inhabits. Players from your FF “team” can be from any real NFL team—say, a wide receiver from the Buffalo Bills, another from the New England Patriots, a tight end from the New York Jets, and the quarterback of the Oakland Raiders. Each league’s draft takes place right before the NFL’s regular season commences, and the season goes until Week 16 of the NFL season. Every weekend, the scores of all the football players in a FF team add up to that owner’s total for the week. These made-up Fantasy teams exist only in their designated league, which could be comprised of friends, coworkers, acquaintances who were looking for extra members, or complete randos. More explanation below—please stick with me on this; I swear it’s fun.

After that losing Fantasy season in college, I kind of gave it up on the grounds that it was too time-consuming and that I would never remember to set my team every week. But earlier this fall, my cousin emailed me to ask if I would be interested in joining her friend’s league. The buy-in was $10, she said, and the draft was that night. After some deliberation, mostly about what clever team name I would choose, I agreed; the buy-in was low, and it would give me something to do while my boyfriend was meticulously honing his own Fantasy team. If you’ve had the good fortune of never sitting through a Fantasy draft, I’ll explain: like the NFL draft (minus the zillions of dollars, minus the suits and yammering commentators, plus a congealing Lean Cuisine on your kitchen table), each participant (AKA owner) takes turns selecting a football player for sixteen rounds, eventually filling each teams’ sixteen slots.

Offensive players are the only ones who count individually in most Fantasy Football leagues (sorry, Clay Matthews). Running backs (who run the ball down the field), wide receivers (who catch the ball, often in spectacular fashion), tight ends (who double as blocker/smashers and ball catchers), quarterbacks (who throw the ball) and kickers (the white guys) earn Fantasy points by either gaining yards or scoring points. Additionally, each NFL team’s entire defense fills one slot, losing Fantasy points for touchdowns scored by the other team and gaining them for scoring points in plays like a “pick-six,” which is that thing you do when you’re really hungry and a full tray of hors d’oeuvres passes by.

Every week, you play one quarterback, three wide receivers (WR), two running backs (RB), one tight end (TE), one kicker, one defense, and one “flex” slot, which you can fill with either a WR, RB, or a TE. Before that week’s football starts, you shift around those slots with your sixteen players depending on who’s hot, who has a bye-week, who’s injured, who’s on a sucking streak, etc. Then you go head-to-head with another owner and their team. To be clear, unless some of your players happen to be playing some of the other team’s players that weekend, your teams will have no direct interaction with each other, à la some kind of Mortal Kombat-esque duel arena. In real life, these football players do not care about your Fantasy team. Another factor to consider is whom each player is going up against; for example, if you have a WR like Antonio Brown who typically puts up high numbers but this Sunday is going up against formidable dreamboat Joe Haden of the Cleveland Browns, you can expect that his numbers will probably be lower than average, and you might swap him out for a less reliable receiver—say, Alshon Jeffrey, who plays for the Chicago Bears and, omg, was born in the nineties. Throughout the season, you can also trade players with other teams and “sign” unsigned players by dropping one of your own. After a season’s worth of matches, you stand to win whatever pot has been determined by the league, usually ranging from a hundred dollars to a few thousand.

Here’s how a typical Sunday goes for an active Fantasy Football participant: around noon, you do one last check of your players on your FF app or on the league’s host site (typically ESPN, CBS Sports or Yahoo!), making sure the injury statuses haven’t changed, taking into account that some of your players may have played on Thursday and their positions (either benched or active to score Fantasy points) are unchangeable. Then before you can say “pass the nachos,” the 1 o’clock games begin, then the 4 o’clocks, then the 8 o’clocks, and suddenly it’s nighttime and you wonder what kind of contribution you could have made to society if football Sunday didn’t exist.

How frequently you check your Fantasy scores depends weekly on the company you keep. Fortunately for me, and unfortunately for the universe, I generally watch football with other Fantasy-ers, so we all spend the day continually shifting our gaze between the wall-mounted TV screens and the live-updating Fantasy phone apps in our hands until our necks are sore and our thumbs are bleeding.

For the record, my team name is Nerds (I gave up on the clever thing), I stand to win about $100, and at the time this article is being written, I am in second place, having been recently knocked out of the top spot by a Wes Welker ankle injury and an unforeseen 30+point performance by the normally ‘meh’ Tayvon Austin. My quarterback Robert Griffin III (RG3) is prone to injury, but his numbers have been mostly good. While pretending not to care about competitive hobbies like these is generally my M.O., secretly I really, really want to win.

FANTASY FOOTBALL PLAYOFFS UPDATE:

When my team entered the three-week Fantasy playoffs, I won the first two rounds handily, thanks to a well-timed pickup of hotshot Eagles quarterback Nick Foles. But, sadly, I was just barely beaten in Week 16, AKA Fantasy Super Bowl Week, by one stupid running back in the very last football game of the weekend. And for those of you who still don’t think that Fantasy Football can be thrilling, consider that I was one (dropped) Josh Gordon touchdown pass away from taking the whole damn thing. My second-place winnings were $20, which makes a total condolence profit of $10. Alas.

Nevertheless, I am hooked. Despite way too many hours squandered on stat-crunching, this new convert will see you next year, Fantasy Football. And if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go buy a book.

P.S. If you’re reading this in late-summer 2014, you’re just in time to sign up for a league! (Also: Did American Hustle win the Best Picture Oscar? Are Dennis Rodman and Kim Jong Un still friends? Who’s the President?) Here are some links for creating a FF league or joining an existing one:

ESPN Fantasy Football
CBS Sports Fantasy Football
Yahoo! Fantasy Football

See you on the field!! And by that I mean the Internet.

Photo by Alyssa Kurtzman

Photo by Alyssa Kurtzman

Sports

A Newb at NERF

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“Hey, you wanna go kill some zombies?”

Excuse me, what?

This über nerdy and physically intense activity is called a NERF war, and I have only recently stumbled across its thriving subculture in my neighborhood.  In Humans vs. Zombies you split into two teams: a team of Humans and a team of Zombies.  The zombies’ mission is to tag the humans and turn them into zombies; the humans’ only chance at “survival” is to mow down as many zombies as possible with NERF darts and get to a safe zone.

I’m a “newb” at NERF, but my fiancé and I have a growing arsenal of NERF automatics, rifles, pistols, and melee weapons that is slowing taking over our limited closet space.  It’s a never-ending stream of Facebook event invites and strangers geeking out online over NERF’s latest gun releases (“I just got the RapidStrike!  You can borrow it next round”).

Don’t Go Alone: Equipment

Photo by Meggyn Watkins

NERF veterans are very welcoming to newbs, and are also typically very trusting with their equipment.  My roommate goes to more NERF events than my fiancé and I do, but he doesn’t own a single gun.  Vets love to share their guns and strategy, huddling up into bands-o’-brothers of mixed experience to fight back the zombie horde.

My first Humans vs. Zombies (HvZ) game was at San Francisco State University with a high school friend who loaded me up with a rifle to carry and as many baby pistols as I could fit in my (super-trendy) cargo pants.  After loading up with darts (specially marked to distinguish from everyone else’s), all I needed was a bandolier of backup dart cartridges and a bandana around my arm (to distinguish me as Human)—I was good to go!

In that first game, there were a couple things I learned.  First of all, no matter how uniquely you mark your darts, you will not get them all back.  Just resign yourself to that fact from the get-go.  Though your opponents are often incentivized to pick them up (either to take them out of the game or to reuse them against you), some will get lost in the arena and some will be picked up but never returned to you.  Organized games usually have a dart box where you can at least take home a portion of the darts you contributed.

Another lesson for a newb is to moderate the amount of gear you carry.  Running from zombies gets tricky if you’re holding onto three pistols to keep them from falling out your pockets and a bandolier of ammo is weighing you down.  Now, I pretty much only carry my rifle (on a shoestring around my neck in case I need to free my hands fast), with one small pistol.  I’m no good at melée, so I don’t bother touting around a foam sword as my fiancé prefers.  I’m also not the best shot, so I’m fairly conservative with my darts.  This means that I don’t even have to carry more than one backup cartridge, because I can refill between rounds before I run out of ammo.

Last lesson learned: don’t be afraid to ask questions!  Especially back at your start point before the game or between rounds, veterans have a bunch of advice to share.  One lady showed me how to duct tape two 18-dart cartridges together for quick reload.  A zombie guy helped me retie my bandana so it wouldn’t keep falling down when running.  Everyone’s there to have a great time and shoot each other with little foam darts: they’ll help you out!

Veteran players usually also have the most visually impressive guns.  Modifying is huge in the NERF community, and it’s not uncommon to find a vet wielding a behemoth double semi-automatic with a shotgun zip-tied underneath!  The versatility of NERF’s stocks and barrels allow for some easy basic modifications, and it’s also quite simple to throw in some overvolted batteries or custom-tension springs to get your NERF darts flying faster and farther.  Some of the more artsy types will even paint and weather their guns for a kickass realistic look.

Competition: Capture the Flag

Not all NERF events are all-day HvZ games.  There are tons of different, classic competition games, just like in paintball and airsoft.  Most are competitive team games: VIP (protecting the president), King of the Hill (protecting a defensive zone), or Capture the Flag (invading the opponents’ base); however, there’s always Deathmatch (individual elimination games) to spice things up a bit and destroy all friendships, Hunger Games style.

The closest NERF organization (B.U.R.N.) to me plays a lot of Capture the Flag tournaments, with rounds of teams competing.  As a newb, I really enjoy these for practice: team games normally include a spawn point, so getting shot just means that I have to run back to a spawn point and count to ten, rather than in HvZ where “dying” involves hanging up my rifle for the rest of the game and playing as a zombie.

Survival of the Fittest: Humans vs. Zombies

HvZ games typically start out with a group of dedicated zombies, decked out in fake blood, decomposing makeup and running shoes.  Zombies don’t carry guns, but must instead be able to use their numbers to overwhelm and two-hand touch to infect humans.  The humans are released first into the arena to spread out, camp up, and get started on their mission.  Missions are typically survival-related, such as finding and moving “food” (a wrapped bundle or cardboard box) from the arena into a human safe zone.  Sometimes, the missions are as unstructured as “create and defend a base.”

My first HvZ game had a twist: there were 20 antidotes and 10 passports.  Not only did humans have to find the little index cards taped around campus, but they also had to compete for them!  Humans without antidotes at the end of round one would die and become zombies, and those without passports at the end of round two would not make it off the infected island.  This was a pretty harsh start for a newb like me when my little merry band was mowed down with darts in round one by a group of fellow humans, as we ran past their safe zone in an escape attempt from the zombie horde.  Pretty sucky!

Yet, being a zombie isn’t half bad!  Yeah, you have to put your gun away, but then the pressure of surviving isn’t constantly freaking you out, and the arena basically becomes a giant playground game of tag.  If you’re shot as a zombie, your game rules will either require you to walk out of sight (behind a corner or tree) or just crouch down where you are and then count to the predetermined wait time.  Then you’re quickly back in the game, hunting down those delicious, delicious brains.

NERF games are constantly being moderated by very dedicated groups!  The organizers are usually college kids, and they appreciate and respond to feedback from NERF enthusiasts.  The mods do a great job of participating and keeping everyone honest during the game.  They also keep the community up-to-date with events and news, typically via Facebook or their own websites.