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We’ve been really lucky to have had some great days out at Neon Play. We’ve been go-karting, we’ve been taught to clay pigeon shoot by an Olympic gold medal-teaching coach, we’ve got whiplash from fairground rides and dodgems and we’ve had pool parties to end all pool parties.
So yesterday, it was time for a bit of paintballing action. And 22 hardy warriors entered the battlezone to do their very best to kill their beloved work colleagues.
Oli and Mark were the team captains and we split the art and tech teams and pulled names out of the proverbial hat. We also invited along a couple of our work experience students (as cannon fodder of course) to thank them for their hard work to date.
Luckily it was only 30 degrees, so the perfect day to be wearing underclothing, a boilersuit and full face protection. It was a bit like being in Vietnam, but not really.
To add a little bit of mischief to proceedings, each team had a hi-vis vest they had to give to a team member from the opposite team, just to ensure we knew where at least one member of the opposition was.
And we had five long, hard and hot games where we had to capture flags, storm the bank, protect the church and generally pepper each other with rather hard paintball bullets.
There was a good mid-game arms race as well where Oli’s A Team under cloak and dagger did a nice “in-app purchase” of some smoke grenades, which provided excellent cover for some forward movement.
As per usual in paintballing, there were war wounds on show, with some nice round bruises all round and scratches and scrapes. This was the best of the lot though...ouch!
The A Team, having lost the first round rather pathetically, eventually went on to win 3-1 - it was a close-run thing with a final storming of the church not quite being successful before the final whistle.
General Oli Christie, Commander-in-Chief of Neon Play barked, “The team have been working incredibly hard and hugely deserve an afternoon out trying to kill each other. It was a cracking paintballing session and we sweated like dogs, fought like cats and the best team won on the day!”