We did night CTF (~9 pm) at our local grade school campus. Easily 40-50 kids. We just rode our bikes to the gathering. Similar rules to what this article had, except no out of bounds. We had kids making huge circuits around a nearby corn field to evade detection.
It was indeed someone of my best childhood memories.
Unfortunately it was all brought to an end because people kept calling the cops. They’d see kids after dark at the school and just assume we were up to no good. No property was ever damaged, the principal knew what we were up to, etc. Wholesome fun.
After the fifth time of coming home with a “the cops showed up” story, our well-meaning parents asked us to please find another game to play.
We did this at boyscout camp until one year my buddy shattered his ankle hitting a hole running in the dark. One ambulance ride, several surgeries, major issues with morphine withdrawal, and that was the end of that.
We played it in the fall at a campground. Our cadet group had the group camping and we played in the 50-100 campsites that weren't occupied for the season. So lots of running between campsites through the pine trees.
The only problem was that the roads were blocked off at the end, with picnic tables, with chains from the picnic tables to the trees beside them.
Our fastest guy found a chain in the dark with his waist. Fortunately he just got turned over and not injured.
I did the same thing except it was a barbed wire fence, cut my neck, shoulder and stomach up- had to get stitched up by my friend’s mom but worked out okay.
Woof, major bummer. We did similar games. Once i was sprinting at max speed and i leapt… but my dangling foot caught a very low hanging chain. My body began to rotate rapidly. Instinct kicked in and as a nearly crashed down I miraculously turned it into the highest speed tuck n roll of all time. As I finished the roll, almost completely unscathed, i leapt again to free my friend from “jail”. I think we were playing manhunt vs ctf. Such a vivid memory because it was so frightening but ended up so positive.
One time in Highschool at a party we played a game of “Fugitive” across a few miles of neighborhood. I don’t think anyone crossed any private property, but the police showed up and told us “You’re scaring the heck out of some people”. We’d basically finished up anyway.
It’s tragic that this kind of fun gets quashed. Arguably avoidable with a little community communication. I generally think it’s a product of fear-mongering. People being told that their neighborhoods are under attack from nebulous “others” who don’t look or sound like them. A ghost story.
It’s super sad how much childhood joy and fun is being sucked out if the world purely due to nosy busybodies. And the fact that police even respond to these (when they won’t even show up if you’re actually robbed) is also ridiculous. Mind your own business, people.
Seeing a lot of similar stories here. We used to do a game of hide and seek on our massive dead end street. Wed use peoples bushes and cars to hide. I still remember the sound of crotchety old mr peabody chambering a round in his shotgun behind us one night. Pitch black. Never saw his face, just heard him let us know we were about to die if we didn't leave. Pretty sure he knew it was 2 little kids
Our games cover a couple of miles of almost unoccupied property. But teenagers don't always make the best decisions and sometimes treat others' property as their own. It can be super disconcerting to have somebody dressed all in black climb over your back fence, run across your porch and disappear around your garage.
Even when you make a clear rule that you can't go past the power line and into the neighborhood, somebody sometimes does.
Do you really want the police to ignore a distress call of prowlers trampling their tomatoes?
Imagine a scenario where some kid is apprehended by a police officer and brought to face the angry homeowner. Restitution cannot be made by having the child buy a new plant to replace the damaged plant. So the child has to buy two ripe tomatoes a week for four weeks to provide the homeowner with some compensation.
No court hearing. No criminal record. Parents involved, but nobody too worked up. Just a valuable life lesson about respecting others and taking responsibility. The angry homeowner still hires the kid to mow their lawn. No hard feelings.
Do we really want our police to be judge, jury, arbitrator, and parole officer?
Well, in this little sketch of Mayberry, my answer is yes. If only we could always exist in the sunny side of Mayberry. It only takes one person in this story to take us out of Mayberry. Fortunately, there are millions of people who do their part everyday to maintain some sense of Mayberry in their community. Some of them are even police officers.
You may have a bit of a caricature of America - the stories you here are generally exceptions, not rules, if they were mundane everyday American life, they won't be news.
It'd be a bit like me seeing a biography of a French alcoholic and riffing on it with "Tbf if I lived in France and I was out to eat [in their fabulous elaborate traditional gourmand cuisine], I'd buy at least one bottle of wine with a meal.
Not a huge fan of people drinking too much, but needs must when it comes to your country I suppose."
I’m not sure it is such a new thing. In the 1970’s we had ann old lady across the street that would call the cops when anyone rode their skateboard on the street or the sidewalk.
> And the fact that police even respond to these (when they won’t even show up if you’re actually robbed) is also ridiculous.
Do keep in mind that these stories aren't taking place in downtown SF or Seattle. In most of the US police respond very quickly to most calls, including real crimes.
And in this case (fugitive) it's likely that the callers didn't know there was a game going on, all they knew was that there were some people acting very strangely in their neighborhood. Dispatch can't distinguish between a legitimate crime spree and overworried neighbors.
I'm certainly glad to have grown up when I did. Lots of fun memories of fugitive when we weren't cooking up fireworks or something from the Anarchist Cookbook.
Most of we thought was fun would probably be in jail time these days.
There was a lot of risky Behavior, but it was all non-violent so if anyone got hurt, it was us, or sometimes our parents property. I don't know how kids these days are supposed to learn you need to cook up white phosphorus Outdoors and not in your friend's kitchen
Risky behavior can be something as simple as burning ants with a magnifying glass. It might seem obvious not to allow children to play Cops and Robbers with BB guns, but guess what they can do with a 9V battery.
We played tag or hide and seek at a school one time after dark. We were probably 16 or 17 since at least some of us could drive by then. Cops called all of our parents and said we'd go to jail if it happened again.
The funniest thing to me was my parents just straight yelling at me about it as my only rule at that time was "don't get in trouble with the cops". I tried explaining it was just tag, the cops were over reacting. They didn't buy it. I told them "I was with Friend A and Friend B. I'm telling you the cops were being ass holes". They immediately changed their tone to "oh, if A and B were there, those cops were ass holes"
One time in about 8th grade we had a cap gun fight around a school around dusk. It didn’t end well when a person driving by saw flashes, heard bangs and kids yelling at each other. The local police showed up, sirens blazing and couldn’t figure out what was what, we ended up talking to them and things got sorted. We got a firm warning about how that could have ended poorly and to pick other activities to entertain ourselves.
>hey’d see kids after dark at the school and just assume we were up to no good.
That sounds totally crazy to me, did these people get into any trouble or fined for just calling the police like that? I assume you're american, in my eastern european country they would NOT be happy about getting called 5 times for this...
It's not entirely impossible to get fined or arrested for calling the police in the US but you have to go extremely far out of bounds. Calling the police because there are kids near the school (hehe) is completely acceptable.
If anything it's the opposite: if you do anything slightly out of the usual - all the way to walking through a neighborhood that doesn't know you - there is a good chance someone will call the police. And that some patrol car will check it out just for breaking the dullness of the day.
Some of the cops who respond (because they might ALL head there, if it sounds fun enough), some will be smiling and relaxed and civil, while others will be very much looking for trouble and aggressive from the start. Such that for example, using plastic pistols in dark or day in public is a serious bad idea in the US.
Can confirm. As a high schooler, I used to meet up with friends in the middle of the night at an elementary school playground. Mostly we would just swing on the swings and chat. Occasionally we'd share a 6-pack of beer, shame on us.
One night, somebody called the cops, who called school district security. When they drove up we left without saying hi because we get it, we're not wanted here.
Well they called the cops back, who chased us down (we ran, 'cause we were stupid). I was apprehended and from the back of the cop car I counted six other cop cars and a helicopter all looking for my friends for the crime of being near a school at night (the cops never mentioned the beer).
Some cop noticed the beer, most likely - and they were one of the good guys.
Another one might have taken this opportunity to start an in-depth "investigation" (read "bullying spree") to figure out who sold the beer and who bought it and passed it on (if anyone in that bunch might plausibly have been underage.)
Seems likely. It's still weird to me that it was worth all of that taxpayer money to keep the helicopter in the sky while they searched for my friends (most of whom took to the storm sewer and were not caught).
Our community has to stage mock events to give these folks some practice. We burn funds every once in a while on purpose to maintain readiness as we suppose. If you plan ahead, you can include hotdogs and soda in the budget.
Yeah that makes sense. We weren't large enough to justify it though. They cancelled the program a few years later (2010ish). I haven't seen a police helicopter over this town since.
I live in a town of less than 3000 people and regularly see/hear the local county shariff's military grade helicopter loitering around for no good reason.
You may be right, but as a former resident of several towns of a similar size hearing a helicopter almost always meant somebody was in critical care and going to a big hospital.
Ours was obvious, at least at night, because it was typically shining its spotlight on some spot on the ground.
Sometimes it would follow you around with the spotlight until a squad car came and pulled you over and accused you of a crime which a similar vehicle was involved with. In my case, the not-me truck was illegally harvesting rock from a park, but my truck bed was visibly empty from the sky so I don't know why they bothered summon the car.
The difference is that those helicopters don't just loiter around or hover over residential neighborhoods - they land at the nearest open field (in my case the town has a small airport) and immediately transport the patient 60 miles to a hospital. The helicopter I am talking about is definitely a military style helicopter and I'm 99% sure it's operated by the county sheriff's department. Gotta justify that budget somehow and there isn't much more fun way to do that than getting to play with big-boy-toys like helicopters.
Once when it happened to me and the whole gang responded, the "lead responder" was clear that he considered that this was a bullshit call and that WE totally had the right to do what we were doing and HE was sorting out a nuisance call to the police. He may also have been playing "good cop" - it's not like I was trusting him. While one of his buddies had parting words for me: "Do you realize what it looked like <insert saucer eyes>?" and "It could have been XXXXX, so of course police has to respond."
About a helicopter, the problem is compounded because that whole outfit needs some quota of flying hours to remain certified. It might be a boring area, and any opportunity to take it out and fly then counts as training, if nothing else can be written up for that flight. That there is a helicopter guarantees that it will be used. And same for SWAT and such.
I bought alcohol for some underage people who asked one time, not perceiving it as a risk because who could tell why I was buying it or watch me give it away? Not until today did I understand what could have happened.
I like to say that in suburban USA, it’s illegal to be underage in public after dark. Cops will harass you for no reason, detain you for no crime, question you with no motive other than to try to peg you with a crime, on the assumption that you don’t know your rights and won’t assert them. If you try to assert your rights they will work harder to try to put a crime on you. And then we wonder why our kids get addicted to screens and don’t leave the house. It’s insanely fucked up and it stems from bored cops fucking with kids because they have nothing better to do.
Can’t speak for the whole country, but in the Midwest, rural community I grew up in, people had a “better safe than sorry” attitude, and would call police on mere suspicion that you were up to no good or that something was amiss.
Even told them afterward how wrong they were, they’d probably shrug and say it was still good for the police to check.
i’ve had the cops called on me frequently for stuff like breaking into my own house?? they’re also really on edge, i’ve had them shout at me to take my hands out of my pockets which… fair i guess?
not to stereotype, but America just has lots of SAHM busybody types
It sounds that the neighboirs doing those calls, did it
to cause problems for the poster above, not to be helpful (basically harassment via fake calls to the police).
I bet they would NOT call the cops if real thieves showed up.
The more calls the police get, the more money they are able to justify by pointing to the amount of calls received.
And, I think, generally it would be a much more enjoyable call to go talk to some parents about a few kids, than to respond to more demanding complaints.
Yeah. I cringe that this mentality is also exported from the US to other countries. I firmly believe that breaking a leg, getting lost in the woods for an hour, being able to play somewhere without any adult supervision, really made me a stronger, more capable, stress-resistant adult.
If you like this, and want to try individual "capture the flag", get into orienteering. Capture the flag on potentially hundreds of acres. (I believe there is a team version too, but I never done that.)
And, if you want to up a notch, try radio orienteering aka fox oring aka transmitter hunting.
Imagine a national park. Now drop (usually) five radio transmitters (no bigger than a briefcase) where each send out a unique morse code.
You build a radio receiver that is light but sturdy that can pick up the signal if you point it at the radio, but the reception gets weaker as you turn it away.
Run! Through the woods, swamps, creeks, crevices. You have to find all transmitter, get a stamp and finish before the others.
We always did that in school where I’m from. I figured it was quasi military training. Here’s a topographic map and a compass kids, now run a few kilometers to the spots marked on your map and report back
I run a kilometer/klick/0.62 miles, re-orient, run, re-orient, and so on. With radio as I get closer and closer it becomes harder and harder and visual search is required, lots of triangulation with the radio.
Old fashioned orienteering is similar, but replace the radio orientation with pulling out a map & compass, re-plot, stash, and run.
Some do longer, some do shorter distances.
When I write "run" I mean I try to move as fast as possible. I can run on flat ground, but sometimes hillsides is just crawling, creeks will slow me down, swamps & bogs are the worst.
I do not know what country your response is based on, but there are lot of national parks in the world, and most parks will work with and even help organize an event. This topic came up in discussions and the general consensus was that if it is completely denied, people will do it in clandestine fashion. If, on the other hand parks work with the run organizers, it not only makes sure rules can be established (e.g., no off trail, restricted zones, zones where only one path allowed, timing) and the park is promoted for general public. A win-win-win-win ;)
Lots of options for wide-open, public spaces other than national parks such as national forest, BLM land, etc.. Maybe little and far between if you're not in the western US though.
We played to play campus-wide capture the flag at the camp I went to as a kid a couple times and I will never forget the experience. The camp spanned an enormous area with all kinds of varied terrain and we had ~170 campers and counsellors playing. I vividly remember patrolling in an out-of-the-way part of our area by myself amongst the rhododendrons and detecting some movement; a counsellor from the other team was hiding amongst leaves. A frenzy chase ensued.
One twist to this game on the enormous area was that neither team knew where either flag was, so you had to send groups to scout your own side to figure out where your flag was. I get why the person who posted this article chose not to have jail, but the jail was another fun dynamic. It gave the opportunity to break people out of jail, which was another goal besides the flag.
The author is completely correct that these are lifelong memories.
We played as a kid and it was always fun but a bit annoying when players would argue about whether they had safely crossed the line when the other team tagged them, so in my 20s, I had the idea to solve that once and for all with 1,000 feet of yellow caution tape! I organized multiple games at Spotts Park in Houston, a city not known for having elevation changes, but Spotts has a bit of hilly landscape to mix things up, plus plenty of trees and other things to hide behind. It wasn't pitch black since we were in the middle of the city, but it was big enough that people could sneak to the other side undetected if they kept looking for routes with no enemy patrols. We actually used glow sticks as the flags and the only particular rule was that they had to be visible from multiple sides if you were several feet away. A lot of adults came out to play--at least a dozen per side but sometimes twice that many!
There's an intensive wilderness school in Washington, and their capstone activity is IIRC a 2 week long game of capture the flag in an even larger area of dense woods
It's a great way to test stalking, camouflage, and survival skills. A lot of the game is played in pitch darkness, where moving silently becomes critical. Rather than a fast-paced running game, capturing the flag often means inching into enemy territory over the course of days, and moving back to your side just as slowly without being detected.
That sounds crazy, and amazing. As I've now got a kid of my own who might eventually be interested, could you point out _which_ intensive wilderness school in Washington that is? I did some googling, but wasn't able to find it.
https://wildernessawareness.org/ - I went there over 15 years ago now and did what is now called The Immersion adult program. The capture the flag type event was around 4 days long, there was another capstone experience that was around 4 days on a survival trip. I think they probably still do these activities but I'm not certain. I thought it was a great program for me. They also have programs for kids and teens including summer camps. I've heard great things about the teen wolf tracking expedition and I imagine their other programs are great too.
There are a few other wilderness schools in the area, some of which may have similar activities, so I am not sure if that is the same one the GP was referring to.
We did a lot of, uh, unofficial versions of these as Dungeons and Dragons-obsessed tweens and teens, resulting in some slightly maniacal, if ultimately harmless, behavior. Our pitch dark bits involved sneaking out via a window and completing a circuit of the neighborhood, which escalated into taking and leaving items stashed in various places as proof, finally culminating in a "yeah, but can you do it completely naked without being spotted?" set of dares.
Our various forest pellet free-for-alls may have resulted in one of us entering the military in some kind of scouting capacity. My personal stratagem was camouflaging myself by remaining stock still in bizarre positions and orientations, resulting in my profile not being an immediately recognizably human outline from a distance, then getting the drop on someone. Others could cover large amounts of ground without much noise, and so forth.
In retrospect, we ended up getting quite good at that kind of thing, very quickly, and with age I realize that this is probably a large part of the evolutionary history of humanity: skulking, hunting and being hunted, deception, complex strategies for evasion and capture, tracking and being trackless, first against the other animals and then likely against each other. This was likely just built-in, waiting for the right prompts to develop.
In my scouts group we used to organize a father and son police, robber and fence game in the woods at night. Robbers had to transport logs to the fence to gain points. Every player had a string round their arm and you could wrestle the players from the other teams to get it. It was very cool to see the boys battle each other and see dads wrestling other dads, older brothers and scout leaders. Or sneaking in the dark with their dad carrying the logs. It was a real father and son bonding experience. Great memories.
we also played a game in scouts called Survival. One of the funnest activities I remember from the trips we went on. There were different roles and a hierarchy between them which made for varied player experiences.
If anyone wants to play a supremely addictive online capture the flag game, there's a completely underrated browser game called tagpro: https://koalabeast.com/ (no idea why the url is that, but I been playing it for a decade, to give an indication lol)
Tagpro is legitimately what I think the model of the ideal game is, which is you don't level up characters and grind, instead you depend on building up your own skill manipulating the physics of the game. It depends on how well you can judge momentum, people's intentions, and it's all about "juking" people. Such a simple game, but because of its physics it's exceptionally skill-based. I'd love an mmorpg that had similar physics that PEOPLE master, so anyone can jump in and play without having to grind. Levelling up your reflexes instead of in-game character stats.
Weird, I remember that game was all over Reddit about 7-8 years ago, then when I remembered it and looked it up a couple years back it was completely dead. No active players in any games, couldn’t seem to find much discussion about it, even the subreddit seemed like a ghost town. Has it come back from the dead?
Might have just been the servers you were connected to. They revamped the joiner so you auto join the best server in a better way now, maybe that’ll help? It’s definitely still very active in that there’s always games you can join (atleast during day time NA timezones) but also definitely still slowly dying due to lack of new players. The skill gap between established players and new players can prly be a little overwhelming
There are many variants played by scouts all over the world.
The different versions:
1) all players get a wool thread around their arm. If the thread is pulled loose from the arm, you are "dead" and need to go back to a "spawn point". This is quite a physical version with some nice wrestling and wolfpack elements. I prefer this version because its visceral.
2) A version where every member gets a certain "rank" from a spawn point. When a player tags another, the ranks must be revealed. This can be a rock paper scissors system or with some wildcards like "mines" that arent allowed to tag, but are deadly for all players except the sapper. You need a card system for this. Many card systems work.
3) a version with paintballs or laser tag. Also fun but you need a lot of gear to do it with a lot of people.
Overall these games are best on long stretches of terrain. There is an optimal terrain width for a nice game. It is biased towards a narrow and long playing field with a lot of good cover interspaced with larger open areas that dont expose the whole width of the field.
Chokepoints can be nice but can also make the game a bit boring. So there is definitely a strong dropoff on the narrower fields.
This would've been 2014, I played in a 100 v 100 paintball game in Western Massachusetts. It was February, so the snow was pretty deep. At one point I stepped through some ice up to my knee.
Rather than run straight up elimination, teams accrued points by holding positions at certain times. You've got the bunker at noon? That's a point. 12:05? Nothing. This led to us desperately defending objectives against 6-to-1 odds waiting for the ref to announce that we'd scored the point.
This reminded me of a game of capture the flag I played also in deep New England snow, with just a few friends, but over maybe a half-mile schoolyard with various buildings and playing fields.
Long periods of silence and slow creeping punctuated by moments of sprinting when you were spotted. Some of the most fun I ever had.
We played infinite variations of this game when I was a member or leader at our youth movement in Belgium. (I don't think such a thing exists in the US?)
Some examples:
A battleship variant: each team first their his ships in a battleship field. Then, when a player can reach the other team's camp without getting tagged, they can shoot one shot into the field of the other team.
A Stratego variant: every team gets his own stack of cards which represent the different players of Stratego, the board game. Players take a card before leaving their camp. If they are tagged, or tag someone, they show their card to the other person. The winner according to the Stratego rules wins the card of the other person, and the loser must go back to their camp for another card.
Nice. Brings back memories of playing Capture the Flag at night at Warren Dunes State Park long ago as a Boy Scout. A quick Google search shows kids are still doing that!
I had tons of fun playing this in Boy Scouts, and when I worked at summer camp we would have a weekly game with around 50 campers on each side.
My dad and I also had a bunch of fun with this shareware version for DOS, so much that a few years ago I finally called Mr. Carr and paid for three copies so we could play the full version:
There used to be a group that organized Capture the Flag games in FiDi, in lower Manhattan. It was a ton of fun, even though I was always worried that some overzealous guy with a flag patch and a machine gun would get antsy about a bunch of people running around.
During orientation week at University of Alberta, way back in the late 90s, there was a huge campus-wide game of capture the flag. All the buildings were fair game, which made it a great way to both meet people (while hiding in a nook or running through the quad) and also explore the campus. It was great.
If you have time, people, resources for such you might also interest in more elaborate variation, my favorite https://killerqueenarcade.com/fieldgame Three different win condition, and one player have special role as "queen bee". Myself have only played arcade version unfortunately.
I live on a dead end street with forest park across, very quiet. For when my boys were preteens, we celebrated their birthdays together and one year we had the typical party with probably 30 kids, I blew up bunches of balloons and made them about a hundred icely sharpened spears out of branches from the forest to throw at balloons to see who can pop the most. My wife thought that was a bad dangerous idea that other parents wouldn't like but it was the most fun part of the event that night for kids. Everyone chucking spears,girls, boys, little hunters came out in them all. Nobody got hurt, except the bballoons. Fun!!!
I live in Austin, and I find out that this happened via HN! Still, cool effort. I'm wondering what the demographics of the players was, for example age range.
Early 2000's, we'd regularly play organized games of CtF upon the capitol grounds — it was incredibly entertaining, even if you weren't actually playing very much (became sort of a HS social / mixer). Typically only a few dozen serious players, but often 100+ participants.
Around 2003 a gf of mine organized a large CTF game at midnight across 9 blocks of the financial district of Toronto. Hell of a fun night, but we only got away with doing it once.
I think a giant gap in this is that the list of rules doesn't account for non-players in the game area. This planned over a large public park which presumably other people use. Do you play around people? Do you avoid them with a minimum radius out of respect, or do you weave by them if it helps prevent someone from getting your flag? Participants loved the game, but how did non-participants in the park at the same time feel about it? Did they feel uncomfortable using the park with the game on all sides?
If you and your friends play soccer in an open area of the park, probably all agree that other people should avoid setting up their picnic in the area of play. Parents and dog-owners should keep their kids and pets from entering. If you and your friends declare the whole park to be the area of play, including the playground, children's garden, bathroom, splash pad and parking lot as shown in the finished map, I think this ceases to be a reasonable expectation, but what the norms should be is ambiguous.
This is why stuff like this doesn’t happen more often.
I played a 10-day game of tag in college. (Called Humans vs Zombie, “humans” were able to tagged by zombies any time that they were outside. We would start with ~150 humans, at the beginning, and by the end of the game only ~30 were not zombies.)
The amount of work that the core-team put in to run the game was insane: reserving space on campus, marketing it to students, defining and refining rules, communicating with campus security, negotiating with campus administration, dealing with rule violations, and more.
I think it’s a shame that it’s so much work to put together and play what is ultimately a very simple game with very little potential to harm anyone. But there are a lot of people who are scared and uncomfortable when other people start running around.
If you say this sarcastically I believe you think there are legitimate reasons to worry when seeing people running around in a park. Can you elaborate why that is?
First, the person I was responding to was talking about a college campus and not a park. Second, the ridiculous number of mass shootings that have occurred in schools in the past three decades including the one on the Virginia Tech campus.
If you see a bunch of people running around and hiding in a place that's not expected it's not a great idea to assume they're doing it for fun. Not with a sad history of gun toting lunatics shooting up public spaces.
This would have been less concerning a couple decades ago, but after Virgina Tech, more than 1 or 2 people suddenly running past me would cause me to make assumptions. Some "Capture the Flag Game in Progress" signs would be comforting in that situation.
True. I got lucky: when we played, there were maybe 20-25 non-players in the entire playing area, so avoiding them was no problem. I didn't hear any complaints about our game. It could have definitely been a bigger problem; thankfully, it wasn't.
I think there’s an analog to individual empathy that happens with groups. Or maybe it is just that group membership tends to suppress understanding of others.
When the group is about fun, people say “why can’t they just let us do our fun thing?” —-meanwhile you have grown adults chasing each other through toddler play areas, screaming at the top of their lungs, running across the road, etc.
I think there is a very good chance this game was played at night when there would be few or no people in the park. They do not mention time of day in the post, but most urban capture the flag games are played at night.
When I was a teenager, some of my friends and cousins and I used to play capture the flag out in the field on horses. It was a whole lot of fun until a serious accident put a girl in the hospital for reconstructive facial surgery. Needless to say we didn't do that anymore after that.
On the bright side though, she recovered fully and ended up marrying my cousin who was there that day and happened to be a first responder.
I organized a huge game of capture the flag for the dorms at the University of Utah back in 1999. We had 3 teams, one for each dorm building. The RAs were given special powers to free people from jail and couldn't be tagged, but weren't allowed to carry a flag. I think most people had a great time. It really helped people get to know their neighbors and the RAs for the year.
Back in the days when playing Steve Jackson's Killer was less likely to get you arrested, I organized a pretty large CTF event at a local park. It was a long, thin park that ran along the river, and the team bases were about a kilometer apart. Standard Killer weapons could be used: water guns, polaroid cameras, water balloons, etc. Being 30 years ago, I don't remember the exact rules, but I think everybody had a couple lives. It was a lot of fun, extremely exhausting, but what I remember the most was that my teenage planning capacity had not accounted for the fact that there would be a lot of people picnicking in this narrow park, who would really not appreciate a bunch of nerds running around pretending to have a war. Oh, and dogs.
the kids are alright. Reminds me of when I organized a real life version of Pac-Man on the quad in 2006, inspired by this game ran on the streets of Manhattan in 2004. https://www.pacmanhattan.com/
We used to do something similar here in Vienna at Türkenschanzpark, one of the biggest (and my favorite) parks in Vienna at night with 20-40 people. It was always so intense, especially not easily knowing who was on your team.
Did similar in NYC in Central Park. Organizers were lawyers, so rules took 3 hours to sus out, but the game took less than 2.
The other team brought walkee-talkies! My team won. A devious member waited and then changed clothes into a bright floral full-length dress with a large floppy hat. Disguised as a random park user, she strolled in, grabbed the flag, and strolled out undetected!
In the Netherlands there's a scout event called Hike and Seek, where there's a 100 checkpoints in a 8 km radius around the start. Some 70 teams try to get as many of those as possible without being spotted over the course of Friday evening until Saturday night.
Seekers can be any car, horse or bicycle or even also walking essentially, so it's a tense game. And hard to find an empty enough place in NL to do this. Great fun though.
When I was a kid, a couple of us had original Splatmaster "marking pistols" and I desperately wanted to do this but as a massive paintball game. Living in the midwest, there were plenty of moderate sized woods one could utilize.
While that never happened, we did have a couple games on a large abandoned farm. Stalking each other within the darkness of the huge barns or climbing up to the top of an old grain silo to snipe was damn fun.
That was a fun read. At summer camp as a kid we played many a large scale game of capture of the flag, but my personal favorite was the in-person Stratego variant. Everyone gets an index card with a Stratego rank on it. When someone tags you, you and they show each other your cards to see who “wins” the tag.
as an over 30 year old, that's easy, and they fit with this post:
1. Playing jailbreak with neighbors
2. A marathon ultimate frisbee game in Valley Forge National Park that went 2hrs without a single goal
3. Playing capture the flag with my youth group
This would be incredible. Back in high school we would play this in a friends backyard. His parents had around 10 acres of woods, creek, and open field. Would be amazing to have an organized event with so many players like this.
Feel like things like this should be something City Park Departments should do. Fun group activities for adults in their parks. Yoga or maybe star watching, and so on. Kind of like libraries do to stimulate the mind.
Capitalism is great, but it kind of sucks that poor people have very few free things to do as soon as they step away from the screen.
Man, I haven't thought about it in a while, but running in the dark is exhilarating, something about the blur of low light vision makes it feel much faster.
We actually didn’t even run in the dark! We played from 4:45-6:30pm, where the sun was very much still shining. Maybe next time I host I’ll do it at night.
great memories as a kid playing 48 hour CTP in 100 acres of woodland. Camo, tackling, building prison cells, escaping from prison, getting lost for hours. Built character.
@ntnbr, the state capitol is also a very good spot for large capture the flag. We played there a few times in college. I remember it being more or less symmetric too.
Wow! I would be slightly worried about getting in trouble there, but yeah: it's pretty symmetric and has some interesting terrain. Thanks for the suggestion!
A bit of advice if you end up organizing it: make sure there's interesting terrain on both sides. Flat, open parks tend to be less fun to play in. Good luck, though!!
It was indeed someone of my best childhood memories.
Unfortunately it was all brought to an end because people kept calling the cops. They’d see kids after dark at the school and just assume we were up to no good. No property was ever damaged, the principal knew what we were up to, etc. Wholesome fun.
After the fifth time of coming home with a “the cops showed up” story, our well-meaning parents asked us to please find another game to play.