I organized a 20-acre game of Capture the Flag
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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.
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...
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.
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).
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.)
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.
The helicopter will go and respond to random calls if it’s not needed for anything in particular.
Not defending the practice, just explaining why a helicopter might respond to something that’s overkill
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.
Fixed wing planes like Cessna 172s are in the ballpark of 100/hr.
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.
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
I bet they would NOT call the cops if real thieves showed up.
Some people try very hard to be assholes.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Not a huge fan of people owning their own guns, but needs must when it comes to your country I suppose.
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."
And many other stats available. I think my point still stands.
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.
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
That’s what tiktok is for
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.
Running in the dark is reaaaal risky
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"
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.
Good luck!
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 ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.scouts.ca/resources/activity-finder/activity-fin...
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.
I'm terrible at it.
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.
Actually, we probably only used 80 acres of it but still....some called it the best game ever.
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.
Long periods of silence and slow creeping punctuated by moments of sprinting when you were spotted. Some of the most fun I ever had.
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.
Some more games with paint, animal cards, ...
Lot of good memories from that time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Dunes_State_Park https://www.glencoescouting.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/W...
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:
Wait, but I am in my youth!
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.
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.
Gosh, and for no reason whatsoever at all! /s
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.
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 don't think we had many, if any, disputes about whether anyone had been tagged, even without the belt flags.
I love the "ball flag" idea.
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.
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!
Highly recommend.
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.
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.
Players with armor could stand more hits because the stamina needed to run to the respawn compressated it.
With scenario variations like capture the flag, keep your fortresses, protect the VIP there was a lot of tactics to do.
We called the cops beforehand and asked for a permission because it was a public land but we had no problem (Spain)
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
Imagine my surprise when he happened to be in Austin where I live and using the same park I take my kids every weekend.
Definitely a great space for CTF.
It was a blast though. So many good memories. I would definitely recommend it if you’ve got the space.
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.