Different Types of Paintball Events!

Paintball truly offers something for everyone! From a unique and fun birthday party for young and new players or an intense athletic competition with money on the line, or even a 24-hour weekend of battles alongside thousands of players at a major scenario game, there’s a style of paintball that’s sure to make you fall in love with the game every time you pull your goggles on and step on the field! If you’re considering taking the next step from weekend recball at your local paintball field or ready to do some traveling to see the paintball world, there are plenty of paintball events out there ready to welcome you!

Tournaments

Not long after the creation of paintball as “The Survival Game” in the early 1980’s, paintball players quickly found a desire to find out who the best was! The solution was paintball tournaments, and competition paintball was born! What started with 15 players and hour-long games on wooded paintball fields many acres in size has been whittled down to the athletic core of paintball. Modern paintball tournaments challenge players to hone the basic skills of paintball – running, sliding, diving, crawling, shooting and communicating – to send opponents off the field and hang a flag to score points, all while on a time clock! Tournament paintball can be played on inflatable speedball fields locally, on the regional level, or nationally in the National XBall League, with teams competing all the way up to the professional level to see who the greatest paintball players and teams in the world truly are!

Woodsball

Paintball was born in the woods and continues to celebrate this heritage with woodsball events to this day! Woodsball covers a wide variety of paintball styles, from recreational games at the local field every weekend to major woodsball events like the Iron City Classic paintball tournament, that challenges dozens of ten-man paintball teams to battle it out on wooded fields, Hyperball fields and mounds fields to see who can hoist the big trophy! Modern woodsball events feature either mechanical paintball guns, or electronic paintball guns with their rates of fire capped at 5-6 paintballs per second to allow movement and keep the game fair, and is often played in a ten-man format, with each team attempting to score points by eliminating players from the opposing team and pulling and hanging the opposing team’s flag. Wooded paintball fields feature everything from the obvious large trees and brush to stacked logs and manmade structures as cover, and teams are challenged with learning how to shoot, move, communicate and win on fields big enough that no one player can see the entire field. Woodsball remains the beating heart of paintball to this day!

Speedball

Speedball, as a format of paintball, was created with the intent of bringing paintball out of the woods for the benefit of a spectator audience and to create a format of paintball that would be more positively received than “people in the woods with guns” by the general public. In those respects, speedball has certainly succeeded, as speedball is now the style of paintball played by local, regional and national tournament paintball to this day! As a general term, Speedball is played on a small, arena-style paintball field surrounded by paintball netting to allow spectator observation, between small teams of three to ten players per team, all using man-made bunkers as cover. Teams start within sight of one-another and the game puts an emphasis on the basics of the game – movement, communication and shooting skills. Modern speedball includes formats like Hyperball (speedball fields built from large sections of corrugated pipes for a futuristic look) and Air Ball, paintball played on paintball fields using inflatable bunkers for cover.

Scenario

Scenario paintball was created by Wayne Dollack to allow players to flex their imaginary muscle while enjoying the game of paintball! Scenario paintball games are generally several hours long, from a full day of paintball to an entire weekend in length, and feature opportunities for paintball players to role play as characters within the game’s scenario to move the game’s story forward. Paintball scenario games often feature storylines based on movies from Star Wars and Star Trek to war movies like Black Hawk Down, and attract hundreds and even thousands of players who love the camaraderie, travel, camping and massive paintball battles! Objectives at scenario paintball games involve challenging opposing teams to capture objectives and hold them for points based on time, take out key characters, or roam the field looking for hidden props and pieces that can be redeemed for points. Some serious scenario paintball players even create costumes and props for the games they attend, adding to the experience and dialing up the fun! If paintball among hundreds and even thousands of paintball players at some of the most amazing host paintball fields in the world sounds like something you could get into, scenario paintball might be for you!

MagFed

One of the most enjoyable new formats of paintball to hit the game is mag-fed paintball. Paintball gun technology has evolved to the point that paintball guns that look and handle like tactical rifles and pistols work as good as they look, and magazine fed paintball has exploded in popularity! As paintball guns that are fed by magazines only hold a 10-20 paintballs or First Strike rounds, the focus of the game is tactical teamwork and accuracy, creating an adrenalin rush and team-based tactical game of paintball like nothing else! Serious mag-fed paintball players can build their own magfed paintball gun to fire either regular round paintballs or spin-stabilized First Strike rounds, using a scope or red dot sight to hit targets with range and accuracy no player shooting round paintballs through a hopper could ever dream of! Top paintball companies like Planet Eclipse, Valken, Tippmann, First Strike and Dye have climbed aboard the mag-fed paintball bandwagon, supporting the format with outstanding products like magfed paintball guns, improved magazines, smaller air tanks, loadbearing gear and, of course, projectiles like First Strike projectiles to make the game as enjoyable and tactically sound as possible! If a mil-sim tactical game of paintball like something right out of Call of Duty sounds like your kind of paintball, mag-fed paintball is for you!