Paintball Raiders Test Day!

I was invited to test out a new site, This site is officially a Paintball site but they are looking to expand to Airsofting so they invited a few of us up to give it a try.

Getting there was easy, a nice trip down the motorway and 15 mins off if that which is an easy journey and was not to far out of the way.

The anxiety of being at a new site with a handful of people i have never met, had really stressed me out. However, once we arrived the Staff members came an introduced themselves and had a chat which made it a lot easier to deal with.

Once we got there we unloaded and got ourselves ready and chatted with the players already there. As it was a small get together there was only 10 of us all together. 

The safe zone looks great, there’s even some sofas to sit on. There’s 2 toilets and a shop that offers drinks and snacks. 

They were even generous enough to offer bacon sandwiches for breakfast! 

Once we had prepped to play and were ready my anxiety had calmed down a little as everyone was so friendly.

The guys running the site have not played Airsoft before but have paintballed (obviously) so they did an amazing job at asking us what we wanted to play, how we wanted to play, what rules we want to use and making sure that they were informed at all times. It was nice to see that even though we were all from different locations the rules were still the same across the board so there was no confusion and everything was always discussed before hand to make sure we all agreed.

The first game we played was zone push in “the village” which has some concrete bunkers and wooden barricades you could hide behind. The objective was to push the team back as far as possible and the one with the most coverage won, which played really well and was a great laugh.

After a quick reload at the safe zone we then made our way to the second location so they could get our feel for the area which hasn’t been used in 10 ISH years I think they said. It was up a huge hill. The area at the top wasn’t too bad but definitely needs some work to make it playable for bigger groups. Getting there was the difficult bit. At this location we played “Capture the flag.” The game went well but ended fast and I didn’t really get a chance to see what happened.

We then moved further down the hill to a bigger flat area they called “hamburger hill” and tried capture the flag again. This area was actually really good to play in and with some slight improvements could be better! 

I almost killed the person who took the flag from my sneaky bush crawling spot but the branches got in the way of my bbs. 

On our way down they were discussing the ideas for the areas we were passing and through each location they were constantly asking for feedback and ideas on how to make it better for us. 

Not only do they want to make the site an Airsoft site, but they want to make it an Airsoft site designed by Airsofter's. Which would have a great opportunity for various games and play styles to be incorporated.

After this we went out for another game in the village where we spent the rest of the afternoon due to the majority of us, me included being knackered from the hills. While we were playing a staff member cooked us all some burgers ready for when we got back. They were great. The weather had also decided to stay nice and sunny, which for March was nice!

Overall i think the site has so much potential and cant wait to see what improvements they make.