The Adventure Begins with EXO

3 hours ago
4 min read

I’ve been preparing for a BIG laser tag adventure that got underway with a travel adventure first! The shortest version of the story involves me making some “creative” choices with my travel route between New York and California that resulted in me taking four, yes FOUR flights to get there (from SYR to DFW to ABQ to PHX to LAX). This was partially a solution when Inhad to regroup because I had planned to be in Hawaii at the start of this trip, but they are currently getting torrential rain (and I was going to visit an outdoor laser tag park) necessitating me to postpone. So I somewhat unexpectedly found myself at LAX on Saturday night, and made a beeline for LaserLand in West Covina to play some EXO before heading to my hotel after this VERY long day of travel.

I arrived in time to join this awesome group (here to celebrate Darren’s birthday) for an hour long session with four games using the EXO equipment.

I let the staff and the players know that I came here specifically because they have something really special. Theresa are only two locations in the entire country that operate using EXO laser tag equipment and this is one of them, making it a particularly unique experience to me. For them, all they knew is “this is laser tag” so I think they weee pleasantly surprised to learn why I was excited to play.

The game marshal gave us a briefing between each game, first going over the equipment and then explaining the special game formats.

Then we suited up in the vesting room.

There were a few changes here and we used the full arena (which in past could be played as two separate arenas or opened to make one large arena. Each half has very distinctive theming. One side is the volcanic city with lava running right down through the carpet (a detail which I really like).

Meanwhile, the other side is a zombie apocalypse supermarket, complete with register line, abandoned grocery carts and the REAL sign of an apocalypse…a self checkout. ;)

We began with a simple free for all game. I played it fully because I did not expect to stay for the whole session (only because I was tired from the day of travel). Spoiler alert…I had so much fun that I actually did play for the entire hour!

In free for all everyone’s pack was solid red. When you tag someone you hear a “clink” sound to indicate a successful hit. When you get tagged you hear a sound effect that sound a little bit like “eeyore, eeyore, eeyore” (almost like a moaning donkey)-‘d your pack starts flashing red and white so quickly that it almost appears pink for a few seconds during the deactivation.

I took first place in that game (playing as Duke), as indicated on the screen on the back of my phaser and the scoreboard out front.

As we gathered around the scoreboard the game marshal announced the top placements. Since they do not use personalized code names, this is how they give accolades to the top players and the group gave congratulations to each of us as she announce the players who were in third through first place that game.

The next game format was zombies. This is a pretty straightforward game that most systems play similarly. Here the zombies were green and were going after the humans who were red to try to turn them all to the zombie team.

The game I found most interesting was Squirrel Wars. It’s a free for all where everyone starts out purple and player tags allow you to gather 50 “acorns” (aka points) for the first minute. After that the packs change colors and you can steal acorns from other players at different values based on their pack color. Red is worth the most at 25, yellow is next and worth 10 and green is worth 5 acorns that you can take with a tag. I switched packs and played this round as “Wolf” (fitting for a squirrel game). I got a kick out of hearing the nutty squirrel sound effects. For the last part of the game the announcement over the speakers would say “red team is now the target” and everyone particularly chased after those of us who had gathered the most acorns.

I gave this game a good effort also, as I figured it might be a rare opportunity to experience their new game concept. I won and apparently received the distinction of “Tail Tagger”. ;)

The final game was Kingdoms. The game master had been watching and put a few of us deliberately on the green team to be “Ogres”. Meanwhile the others were put on three other color teams and given various special abilities. All the other teams took three tags to “kill”, but had unlimited lives. The Ohres only had 15 lives each, but were a ten hit to “kill”.

The red team were the Knights and they got rapid fire as well as a revenge shot that could be taken when their pack was flashing rapidly.

The blue team were the Ghosts. They are harder to shoot, as they have no shoulder targets lit up, only chest and phaser targets. They also get a quicker respawn.

Purple were the Vikings. They could get a kill streak of three to get a machine gun style feature.

And as I said, we Ogres were green with limited lives, a higher hit allowance and shotgun strength. However, there was also a bonus for all other colors if they could accomplish the deactivation, so there was incentive that made us the particular targets.

When the ogre shoots, the phaser makes an “arghh” sound effect, kind of like an ogre’s growl. Very cool touches to style the game beyond the normal sounds.

Everyone really liked this game. I know that not only from reactions, but the game marshal took a poll of our favorites at the end. I think that is a really smart way of identifying what formats your customers really respond to.

While my day did not end up where I expected, sometimes things work out in the best way possible. Of all my previous visits, this was my favorite experience at LaserLand so far!