fun

  • Go Shoot Somebody, Feel like Captain Kirk

    ByJohn Brown

    Imagine running and dodging for thirty minutes through dimly lit corridors as kids with guns chase you down and shoot you with glee.

    That’s what happened to me recently.

    The kids were daughters 1, 2, and 3. On my team were dead-shot Nellie and daughter number 4. The dimly lit corridors were provided by the Cache Valley Fun Park. The guns were lasers.

    This was my first time playing laser tag, and I must report that we had an absolute blast. For twenty minutes we dodged and ran and shot with wild abandon. It’s like paintball without any of the pain, unless of course you crash into someone.

    Here’s how it works. You divide up into two, three, or four teams. The attendant gives each of you a vest and scans you onto the appropriate team (your laser has a bar code and is attached to the vest with a cord). There are markings on the front and back of each vest. If someone lasers those markings, you lose points. If you shoot someone else’s vest, you earn points. It’s that simple.

    All the teams go into the half-lit battle room–cut up with walls, corridors, and windows–and the game begins. You try to kill them. They try to kill you. You try to shoot their bases, but if you linger too long the bases shoot you. It quickly turns into chaos fun. You shoot someone only to have a daughter sneak up behind you and nail you in the back. You flee, waiting to regenerate, only to find that sneaking daughter has followed you through all the twists and curves and kills you the moment you come back to life. But the next time you escape, and you’re the one that’s got them running. It’s like a video game except better.

    The system automatically keeps score for each individual and each team so you can have a player on the losing team actually be the high scorer. We could have gone on for another hour.

    Of course, me and my exceedingly svelte figure might have had to take a breather. Or not. I don’t think twenty minutes of aerobics has ever passed so quickly. And I didn’t have to follow some gal in a pink leotard to do it.

    But you’re not there for the cardio-vascular benefit. Although I can see the ads now—the Laser Tag diet! Featuring Bob, a happy nerd who played laser tag for thirty minutes each day and lost 200 pounds. He could join up with Subway’s Jared so they could be geeky together. Hey, wait a minute. . . I’m smelling moo-lah!

    The only negative is that the game isn’t bargain basement cheap–$4/person for 10 minutes of play, $10/person for 30 minutes. So we might not do that every time we take the family to Logan for some fun, but you can bet we’ll be doing it again.

    Go shoot somebody. Feel like Captain Kirk. You’ll love it.

  • Last Word & Park City Peaks

    ByJohn Brown

    LastWordGameMy youngest’s birthday fell on Thanksgiving this year. We asked her what she wanted to do. She said she wanted to go to a hotel to swim and then play a game as a family, so Nellie and I went to work. Nellie got the game. I got the hotel. Both were great.

    The game was Last Word by Buffalo Games Inc. It’s fairly simple. There are subject cards with categories on them like “vegetables,” “breeds of dogs,” or “places you find water.”  Then there are letter cards. Each player gets a subject card.

    The round starts when someone flips over a letter card. If you can think of a word that starts with that letter in your category, you shout it out, slam your subject card down, and then everyone else tries to come up with words that start with that letter and fit the category.  Or you try to think of words in someone else’s category if they beat you to it.  There’s no order to it–you just shout out the words as they come to your head.  The last one to come up with a word before the timer buzzes wins that round. The twist that makes it so fun, however, is that the timer is random.

    You can play individually, in teams, or some mix (our youngest and I teamed up). Because of the random timer, anyone who can think up a word can play, which means our daughter who is eight could compete with the one that was seventeen.

    We had a great time. One of the funniest things about it is that everyone is desperately trying to come up with words. Some fit, some don’t. Some don’t even exist. For example, when we did the category “male names,” number 3 shouted out “Mancake.” We couldn’t stop laughing. I think that one is going to enter the family vocabulary.

    ParkCityPeaksHotelWe also had a great time at the Park City Peaks hotel. As far as rooms go, they were good rooms. The bed was a bit too soft for me, but perfect for my wife. We got them for $65 a night, which isn’t bad at all. But it was the pool that made the experience. 

    The pool is an actual pool, not the big bathtubs some newer hotels offer. For example, the deep end is six feet deep. But the cool thing is that half of it is indoors and half of it is out. And the outdoor portion is heated. There’s also a large heated hot tub outside as well. In the picture it’s the thing producing the long row of steam in the back.

    It helped that we didn’t have much snow so the place wasn’t crawling with skiers. In fact, we had the pool mostly to ourselves. So imagine: there we were on a November night in this alpine setting, the steam rising off the water, swimming and horsing around underneath the winter stars. It was marvelous. You can be sure we’re going back.

    BTW, we had Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant. Let me recommend this to you. It makes the day a breeze. You can still have your homemade turkey dinner, but picking up the turkey  a few days after the holiday allows you to get them for cheap, cheap, cheap.