Chapter 5

HOW PAINTBALL IS PLAYED

RULES OF THE GAME

One of the greatest things about paintball is its versatility. Like tag (a very simple concept), it can be modified and adapted in an unlimited number of ways. In fact, paintball can probably best be described as long-range tag; virtually anything you can imagine doing with a game of tag, you can adapt to a game of paintball.

There are many wonderful resources available that describe game variations – among them being Durty Dan’s Game Variations (http://www.luminet.net/~tyger/paintball/Games/dansplat.html - this site provided by Rob ‘Tyger’ Rubin, a long-time writer and videographer of the sport). I encourage players to try as many different variations as they can, because you never know what’s going to turn into a great game of paintball.

When it comes to more formal versions of the game, there are a number of official rulebooks, most associated with the major leagues that support competitive play. Fortunately, all of the basic rules are very similar.

Here’s a generic run down of the rules of play for Basic Flag-based Games.

Designate a playing area and mark off its outer boundaries in some visible manner (surveyor’s tape is the ‘go-to’ solution).
Place a starting location (flag station) at either end of the playing area.
Place a flag station in the middle of the playing area.
Place a ‘flag’ in the center flag station (such as a towel, rag, traffic cone…); alternatively, place one flag in each of the flag stations at the ends of the field.
Divide players up into two teams.
Set a time limit for the game (3 minutes, 5 minutes, 30 minutes).
To win the game, one team must take possession of the flag from the center flag station and carry it in to the opposing team’s flag station – or – one team must capture the opposing team’s flag and return it to their own flag station.
Players are eliminated from the game when they are hit with a paintball that breaks and leaves a mark. Players who leave the field boundary are also eliminated, as are players who voluntarily ‘surrender’ (instead of getting shot).
A player who has a paintball mark on them may not be the player to ‘hang’ the flag in a flag station.
Players who wipe off a paintball mark or continue to play the game with a known mark on them are considered to be cheating.
If time expires without a flag being hung or if all players on both teams are eliminated from the game (possible as a result of “simultaneous elimination”), the game ends without a winner. You can also ‘score’ a game that ends without a hang of the flag by counting eliminations, by giving a ‘win’ to a team that has grabbed a flag but not hung it, by the team that was the closest to hanging, etc.

Of course, many players are not interested in formal rules, aren’t interested in setting up flag stations or anything like that. All they want to do is run around in the woods, shooting their guns and getting shot at, which is a perfectly acceptable way to play the game. For these style games, the simplest rules are the best, and those are found in a game variation generally referred to as elimination.

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The remainder of this chapter introduces and discusses the various forms of paintball play - standard capture the flag formats, scenario and tournament play, what play at commercial facilities is like, what a day of play is like, what you can expect from other players and how to obtain useful information from a commercial site before attending.