“Subway!” An Xtreme Play City Adventure

tiviachick
1 day ago
3 min read

One of the best experiences of my trip was getting to tag inside a really creative, city themed arena at Xtreme Play Adventure Park in Danbury, CT. A couple of games of Helios 2 with these awesome competitors made for some of the best tag of the day!

When I arrived I was directed to an arena with a “Final Assault” sign pointing the way.

The first thing I noticed was the Zone scoreboard, indicating what system I was about to play. The second thing I noticed was…an actual pay phone booth?!

Yes kids, we actually used to use these things back in the day. :) It’s absolutely possible that the last time I actually DID use a pay phone was calling home for a ride from a junior high dance, but this time I called for some players to join me (kidding, just a cool prop) and I was excited to get to tag with Kayla, Ella and Geo.

I didn’t know until entering the single-level arena that “Final Assault” meant the theme was a ravaged NYC. Now, two things hit me immediately about this arena’s theme. First, they did the city theme INCREDIBLY well with details that I’ll go into momentarily. However, the bigger thing was that I looked around and I really had no idea which arena designer’s work I was looking at! Usually I can identify the hallmarks of one company vs another pretty quickly and (let’s be honest) usually themes get repeated in multiple locations. However, what I was looking at here was a really fresh and original take on the city theme. I was told the owner had a lot of input on the design concept. I’m not certain who actually executed the design (though I do have a guess as I look back on it now), but they did a fantastic job bringing cool theming elements into every corner of this arena.

My absolute favorite element was the full size subway structure in the center of the arena.

This is a brilliant piece of game architecture that allows players to tag in, around and through the entire prop and it is now going on my list of favorite “statement structures” that I have seen. Check out how the players can tag in and out of it.

The other prop I really liked a lot (which is hard to show because of the lighting) was the working crosswalk sign.

And it worked exactly as well as it might have on any city corner…meaning nobody waited to cross, lol! It looks like they really went out of their way to add some truly authentic elements to the space.

A prerequisite for any ravaged city look is the burning dumpster…this is fine!

All of this to comment on and I haven’t even talked about the game yet, but these players made it SO MUCH FUN! I actually broke a sweat by the time we had gone through both a team standard game and a solo FFA.

I like when the game settings allow you to take the base more than once (twice in this arena).

In the solo round they incorporated a ton of colorful Zone targets that were not active during the team game. We chased each other around the entire space, tagging through windows, around barrels and overall just enjoying an excellent game.