Day two of Armageddon was…weird. This year I was once again driving myself rather than riding the bus, which is a key factor in my being able to salvage the night with some independent laser tag stops, which I jokingly referred to as “Tivageddon”.
I will not get into the whole thing, but the bottom line is we were not able to play the system intended for day two of the tournament. Only after the bus had traveled about five hours from Long Island into central Pennsylvania and multiple hands were in the mix did this determination get made. Since most people had left their cars behind in Long Island, they just re-boarded the bus and continued on to the night two hotel in Bensalem. Meanwhile, I regrouped and found some teammates were interested in joining me for my “side quests”.
Playing more tag in the tournament off hours is nothing new for me. I do this almost every time. Grumpy and I both had vehicles with us and I had already plotted out a few arenas in the area, as is what I typically do. There were four laser tag arenas located between our starting point and the hotel. So we took as many people as we could fit to ride along and join in these four stops, meaning a group of seven of us made a caravan to each location.
The first location was Go N Bananas Family Fun Center in Lancaster, PA.
I was excited to have the chance to play some older Helios here. Before we played our game we added stickers to the map to indicate from where we were all traveling.
Then we got ready to enter their “Urban Quest” laser tag arena.
Then we suited up in the vesting room and got ready to play.
This was a nice, double level arena and after what had already been a long day it was nice to just tag for fun with my friends.
What a nice way to start this side trip!
From there we continued on to Rocky Springs Entertainment, also in Lancaster.
This facility was awesome to us, from being flexible to accommodate us in the first place to then treating us all to an extra game on the house. Initially, we were told they didn’t have the staff available for laser tag when we arrived, but when I explained a bit about why we were there (and that we could easily ref ourselves) they made it happen for us and it was a memorable stop. With the benefit of hindsight, this could have been an excellent stop to pick up CyberBlast as a system for the tournament.
This was a cool arena themed like an abandoned amusement park, complete with a raised platform merry-go-round to tag through in the center.
The walls provided an eerie atmosphere and there were bases in opposite corners guarded by creepy clowns.
A roller coaster, fun house and other abandoned attractions completed the field.
We finished our first game and discovered that I had earned the high score of the month!
Then we enjoyed our complimentary bonus game and thanked them as we continued on.
We were cutting it close, but after calling ahead to Grand Slam USA in Malvern, PA they were kind enough to stay open for us to get into one final game of the night right as they were about to close.
Everyone was pretty pleased to play some Lasertron LT-11 here.
This was a lot of fun! It’s a nice little arena and the game was a great time.
And for our final stop we ventured over to Our Town Alley in East Norriton, PA.
We enjoyed dinner in their restaurant before doing a three game session of Lasertron.
This was a very nice, new-looking single level arena with a couple of raised platform areas on each side.
I enjoyed the first game, but knowing that I was planning to sit out the system the next day in competition, I just played lightly for the subsequent games and sporadically took photos as my teammates used this time for practice.
So even though the day had started strangely and we did not play the intended tournament games, this turned out to be a pretty great way to salvage the evening with some fun when we all REALLY needed to play some laser tag.
I didn’t find out until afterwards that other players would have been interested in this (and of course the bus being the primary mode of transport made this a hindsight kind of revelation anyway), but next year I’ll make my personal route known to the group in case anyone else wants to play even more laser tag between tournament hours and join in the kind of adventures I have, now and forever to be called “Tivageddon”.
Comments or Questions?
Contact: Tivia@tiviachickloveslasertag.com
Websites: www.tiviachickloveslasertag.com and www.photonforever.com
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