Tournament-Style Woodsball is Back!

There was a time that all paintball, from a player’s first day experiencing the game to professional-level tournament paintball, was all played in the woods. As paintball grew and evolved, however, those days ended as paintball developed an identity outside the tree line as a competitive, extreme sport. What began with speedball evolved into Hyperball on fields full of futuristic, corrugated tubes, and then evolved again into air ball, with players using brightly colored inflatable bunkers for cover at major sports venues like Raymond James Stadium or Huntington Beach, California! However, as things often do, paintball has come full circle and competitive paintball in the woods is back and growing!

When professional paintball came out of the woods and onto Hyperball and air ball paintball fields around the turn of the millennium, pro paintball was still played with ten-man teams facing off against one-another. That, too, changed, as ten-man splintered into seven-man paintball and XBall in leagues like the NPPL and the PSP. Now, thanks to the organizations like the Fight Club (that we don’t talk about), dedicated woodsball players like Kevin Donaldson and Marcus Davis, and of course Tim Montressor, competitive woodsball in the legendary ten-man format has been reborn and is enjoying exponential growth, as old-school players dust off their gear and new players fall in love with a portion of the game they only saw in old pictures or old paintball movies, and realize why it’s so amazing! 

With old-school professional paintball players coming out of retirement and bringing their kids with them, ready to carry on the family name alongside industry legends and new players, there has never been a better time to fall in love with competitive paintball in the woods! Valken has all the gear a serious paintball player might need to step off the turfed airball field and into the woods to experience a new dimension of serious paintball. As most throwback, classic style paintball tournaments featuring Hyperball, woodsball and mounds fields are governed by new, classic rules that either require a mechanical paintball gun or drastically limit rates of fire for electronic guns, players are gobbling up modern mechanical paintball guns as fast as companies can crank them out. While some teams are running Autocockers, both old and new, to great effect, many players are stepping onto the field with modern mechanical paintball guns like the Shocker AMP with its new mechanical frame, the Eclipse M170R, or the affordable, but massively upgradeable Eclipse EMek! Players on an even tighter budget can now even purchase mechanical conversion frames for paintball guns they might already run, or pick up a GOG eNMEy and hit the field!

Lower rates of fire and single-trigger paintball guns mean that while many players do stick with their high-end paintball hoppers like the Dye Rotor or LT-R, a Virtue Spire or a Bunkerkings CMD, many players find they can shoot more than fast enough with a Pinokio Speed or a Valken V-Max+ paintball loader. However, in the woods the game is as much about accuracy as consistent, high rates of fire as the larger fields, brush and varied terrain allow players the chance to employ fieldcraft and creep, crawl and move around the field to make critical shots. That means accessories like a barrel kit with a barrel tip long enough to push through brush or a hole in bunker is extremely important, and that’s where barrel kits like the Field 1 Acculock or the Gog Freak XL barrel can make all the difference. Other key accessories for serious woodsball include a larger paintball air tank to ensure there’s plenty of air for longer games and anti-fog paintball goggles that are as comfortable as possible for long games in the woods.