Tactical Tag at Dragon’s Lair

10 hours ago
5 min read

During my recent Iowa tag travels, I made a special point of visiting Dragon’s Lair Family Adventure Center in Cedar Rapids, IA. I had done my homework ahead of time and learned that this site operates using Laserwar tactical laser tag equipment, which is a system I rarely get the opportunity to play, so I knew I wanted to have an opportunity to play it again. However, my experience at Dragon’s Lair was completely different and I had a chance to try some of the Laserwar taggers for the very first time, making this well worth having flown half-way across the country to play!

I signed up to join an afternoon public session and was first given a tour of the arena, beginning with the armory room to check out the different tagger options.

Dragon’s Lair owners Seth Pettit and Aaron Laird showed me around. I looked over the selection of choices (they have a wide variety of products from this company) and my eyes immediately went to things I was seeing for the first time, each with their settings customized for different levels of “damage” or features to use during the game.

I was most interested in the models I had not seen in person before, such as this LMG style.

Players could choose from a variety of tagger options including the Phoenix…

The Predator…

And the Pistol (which I had tried at the Laserwar booth at IAAPA a few years ago)…

However, there was one option available that really seemed to call my name. I wanted to play this session using the Pulsar.

The name alone would have made me feel like this one was for me, but I gravitated to it because I had never seen this model before. Seth told me it came out about three years ago, so it made sense that I was seeing it for the first time here. It had more of a sci-fi styling to it (as opposed to the more realistic styling of the other options) and it had a more space-fantasy sounds attached to it as well.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/4bae25_b9f96ead477641e28ca9326fc8c93223/file

As someone who typically plays traditional laser tag, this appealed to me the most. So this is the tagger I chose to use throughout all the games played during our 80 minute game session.

I joined with a group that included some young teens and a couple of other public players and we were asked to break up into teams and select our code names for the “tournament” of fire and ice.

I joined with the blue “ice” team and we were led back to a base room where we got instruction for each format via a custom video briefing presentation that started with an AI host named Shiva giving general briefing info before pieces of an overall medieval fantasy story line were incorporated at the start of each game.

Here at the base we could reactivate as needed using the Smart Kit on the wall.

We prepared to play seven different game formats for this session inside the approximately 5000 square foot arena with upper level towers and a symmetrical lower level floor plan (which I prefer for tactical games). The arena had some light theming going on inside.

I was excited to get the chance to go out there and play!

For our first mission we played a fairly standard “Battle for Points”. The blue team won that round and I top scored for my team.

Very clearly the young teens on my team had been here before and one in particular took on the role of “Captain”. He didn’t know me at all, but before the next game round he pointed to me and said, “ok, you two with the top scores go here, we’ll have defense here…” and he laid out a strategy, which made me smile at his take-charge approach. It worked, as we won our next game format called “WMD” (aka Weapons of Mass Destruction).

Our third mission was “Capture the Flag”, which I felt quite confident about. While the opposing team focused lore on tagging players, I zeroed in on the objective…and found the neutral flag device in a largely unguarded area, so I was easily able to run several flags back and for the from our team’s location.

I am guessing that these same devices would likely come into play for Domination, though we did not play that format this time. Instead, we moved on to an original custom game they created called “Medic-Medic”. For this format we needed to locate our “friend Jeremy” (who was identified by a blue light above his head) and move him along to our base using proximity. This was really cool because it was a mission of their own design that I had obviously never played before. Nice variety! Jeremy only takes one step per second. I got to him and started moving him along, but unfortunately we lost that round because we didn’t get him back to base on time.

The fifth mission was called “Disarm the Bomb” and incorporated a prop device that allows players to type in numbers until they identify the correct code.

That young take-charge captain knew exactly how he wanted us to approach this game and successfully achieved the goal. Our blue team had a strong lead in the standings at this point.

The sixth game format was called “Ammo Boxes” and was a bit of an Easter egg hunt with the final result decided not by tags, but rather by math. The first goal was to retrieve as many hidden ammo boxes during the game as possible and return them to your own team’s base. We did well, acquiring four of (I believe) nine boxes.

However, what we could not know while gathering the props is that each box had a different letter on its side.

The game marshal had a random card (different every time they play this format) which had point values for each of those letters. While a couple of boxes added points, we knew we were in trouble when we got to the first box worth a negative number. Sigh, this was partially luck of the draw as to which boxes were worth positive points, but we were still pleased to have found so many of them!

The final game format was “Death Match”. This name is used in many systems and is typically a standard game, however in this case it was played as an elimination game instead. We were all provided with increased health at the start and the objective was to deplete the health and eliminate every player on the opposite team. Last team still standing wins the final round. I’m pleased to say our team won both the round and the session, five to two.

Dragon’s Lair provided a very unique experience and was well worth a visit! Aaron and Seth shared a bit about their business, which is just about to celebrate nine years operating in the Cedar Rapids community. Aaron originally opened his laser tag on June 5th of 2017 in a different location with a much smaller arena, before moving into this new site with space for the 5000 square feet of laser tag space as well as multiple escape rooms. They even have a VR escape room available here. I was appreciative to be able to take home a t-shirt for my tag swag collection as a souvenir of an awesome afternoon spent at Dragon’s Lair Family Adventure Center!