Swedish Ball

AC Paintball 8 Our man on the ground in Sweden, Ben Thompson shares his Swedish Paintball Experience with The Catshack Reports as follows…

Somewhere between the guttural screaming, the whirring of a helicopter swooping over the field and the time you push the button on a bomb that actually explodes above your head, you realize you’re not in Kansas anymore… or anywhere near America in fact. This is paintball, yes, but Swedish style.

I played my first games at the Uppsala Aventyr Center a year ago while studying abroad. In fact, the first Swedish person I ever met was Peter Hellman, the captain of The Unit, mil-sim(ish) Stockholm based team. I knew I was going to Sweden so I YouTubed ‘Swedish paintball’ and found some of his vids. He has since gone on to document the ongoing series of Weekend Wars in Sweden, turning out DvD’s and increasing the quality of each successive film. The fields rotate around Sweden, but the same 100 or so people travel around to each field. Uppsala is a combined woods/village field. One in Bockaby is a real village used by the fire department for test fires. The buildings are multiple stories and the streets littered with burned out buses and cars. The team The Rock has access to an old Army bunker, buried in a mountain, where flashlights are required and the battles take place in concrete tunnels deep below the mountain. I’ve only ever played at Uppsala, but as I am here now for at least two years, I intend to do the whole circuit.

This weekend its Weekend War 6 and three of the teams, The Unit, BFP and The Rock, have contrived to have a decommissioned military helicopter do flyovers so they can film and photograph the action.

While conventionally, most of the rules are the same (ie, you’re hit you’re out), AC Paintball 71 safety speaking Swedish paintball is a creative players dream, a field owners frolic and a insurance companies worst nightmare. The lawsuit culture is pretty nonexistent over here. You play at your own risk. You use common sense. If you get hurt doing something risky, it’s your own fault…. but if you feel like doing something risky, knock yourself out (literally… been there done that last autumn).

By now, this is my 5th game in-country so I am not surprised to see players boosting each other over walls to clear the inside of buildings, or throwing hot smoke around on the field. We are right in the Gulf Stream. It is always wet. Nothing is going to catch on fire anytime soon.

The games are also a bit different. Swedes like to play fair so the games each last an hour, a series of missions over the course of two days that each team gets to play against the other. The team with the most W’s is the victor.

Rikard, the owner, pours a lot of the proceeds back into the field. Every time I’ve attended there have been new buildings, bunkers and improvements. Last year there were five forts with flagpoles to compete over. Today there are 9.

It is fun. Each time the angles change. What was a mint position at the last game now has vulnerabilities. What was once an unusable avenue now has new potentials. It’s excellent, to have a field only 3 miles from my house that is constantly evolved and refreshed.

The first block is simple capture the flag. Which ever team with the most flags flying Red or Blue at the end of the hour gets the win. Blue does alright. We get four in the first round. The center of town is held, but manpower to keep them means that a few desperate attempts are made unsuccessfully at the ones further back in the woods. The hour ends, we have a 20 minute refit/water up break and hit the field again, this time from opposite spawns.

The day will go on like this, each mission a little different, each team getting a chance to play through from the other spawn so that there can be no arguing over geography playing a role in the final results. At midday there is an hour lunch break and it is time to set up the bomb missions.

AC Paintball 16 This is the wildest part of Swedish paintball and my personal favorite. Rikard rigs half sticks of dynamite on the flag poles and the Blue team designate me the engineer. I get to run around with a big gray box. Inside the box are two leads, a key and a big red button. The enemy is allowed to spread out and guard all the forts, Blue team must start in our spawn, tucked back up a rocky hillside in the dense Swedish woods. The town is just outside our respawn, but having learned from the last game the difficulties of taking the wood forts, we opt to fake out the enemy entrenched in the town. The horn goes off and the entire team takes off into the woods, leaving the town untouched. We overrun the first wood fort, a screaming mob of Swedes. The leads are underneath an old army truck so I crawl under, hook up the wires and turn the key. A red light turns on. Time to party. I slam the big red button. The truck protects me from the blast, but a few of the Swedes remind me that it is polite to give some warning before detonation. They do so love to be polite. The bomb goes off 90 seconds after the game start and the Red team complains that we MUST be cheating, but the refs set them straight. We turn our attention to the town, mobbing each building in succession, gleefully detonating each charge as our juggernaut works its way back towards our respawn, trapping the enemy between the main force and all our respawning players. It takes us 40 minutes to blow them all, but in a translation error I think it’s only 24 minutes.

We get a 20 minute break and set back up again, working out a defensive plan to stop the Reds, who are thirsty for vengeance. Peter takes the Unit and I to the back fort by the truck. They ghillie themselves up and we dig in… waiting…. The game starts…. 2 minutes later a bomb goes off….. 8 minutes after that a second….. then another … and another…. we are the last bomb. I check my clock. 19 minutes. Not so bad.

“Six minutes boys… we got this.”

“Six minutes?”

“Yea… its been nearly 20. We hold them off for 5 minutes we win.”

“Ummmm… nej. It took us 40.”

“…… 40?”

“ja.”

We can see the Red team pouring through the trees towards us.

“innnnnnnnte bra.” (not good)

They get the first three of us really quickly, mobbing us as we try to slow them down. I sprint the 400 meters back to respawn, grab as many Blues as I can and sprint back. Albin and Fredrik are walking out too, which means there are only two members of the Unit against the screaming Red horde. 21 minutes.

AC Paintball 50 The catch is that only the engineer can use the bomb. One of the blues sells himself to shoot their engineer just as he is opening the box, buying us some time. We run charge again and again into the rear of the Reds, hunting for the engineer each time, who happens to be wearing a very obvious neon green camo jacket.

Five of the Blues break off and cut off the path from the Red respawn. 28 minutes.

The Reds try to surround the truck and make a perimeter. On my next reinsertion, now my fifth, I run the tape line around the perimeter. I manage to clean out two of their players and head down the hill. I can see them huddled around the truck. I opt for pyschological warfare.

“OKAY! YOU TWO GO RIGHT… YOU THREE GO LEFT… THE REST OF YOU COME WITH ME!!!”

The red players around the truck brace for an attack that will never come. The engineer, standing confused in the road, gets picked off again.

38 minutes.

I low crawl through the bushes as close to the truck as I can get, waiting for the engineer. By now the Reds have wised up that no one is attacking them from the hillside. They starting hounding through the bushes. I don’t know it, but I am surrounded. Peter is 20 meters away, watching the bomb. He has two Red players huddled in a bush not ten feet from his position. He points is gun at them, but continues to watch the bomb. I see the engineer coming down the road, but get lit up by the sweeping party. I walk past Peter just as he makes his move. He lets all the guards go past, shoots the engineer square in the chest and then spins right, opening up on the two reds right next to him.

I’m running back to respawn at this point, dog tired, checking my watch, waiting for the bomb to signal our defeat….

39:20…. 39:37….. 39:48…. 40:00…. 41:00…. 43:00

The bomb goes off as I tag up, 3 minutes too late.

An amazing effort from the whole Blue team. I thought we were dead in the water, but all 40 players gave 20 minutes of heart and bought us a victory.

The next two games consist of an attack and defend mission.

Each team gets to defend the central fort. The attacking players have the bomb and unlimited respawns. If the defenders get hit, they are out. They can deploy anywhere on the field, but if the attackers set off the bomb in the central fort, the game is over. The games are quick. Half an hour each. Intense battles in the center of the field. They widdle our numbers down until there are only a handful of us left in the central fort. The Swede next to me runs out of air and gets up to leave.

“YO! Stay man! Just get behind me… when I get hit, I’ll leave me gun.”

“Okej!”

We huddle in the tower, trying to cover 3 angles at once. I get gogged and dropped the maverick. As I reach the deadzone there I can hear the furious pump-pop of the Swede in the tower making his last stand.Â The Reds win by one minute.

AC Paintball 49 The final mission is the Swedes’ favorite. “Rescue Bubba/Gump”. Two giant waterlogged dummies are changed in different locations on the field. One member of the rescue team gets a key for the padlock. The team must recover the dummies and then hold out until a truck comes to extract them. The trucks are old army vehicles the field managed to purchase second-hand from the Army. We give the key to some soccer-playing boy-wonder who says he can reach the center fort in 15 seconds or less. Game starts and he disappears. By the time the rest of us reach the center fort and start trading shots, he has already unlocked Bubba, dragged him outside and headed off to find the second hostage. While the rest of the team makes a perimeter around the extraction zone, I collect every 50-gallon drum I can get my hands on and make an Alamo. Last year we held out just fine until the last 3 minutes when the truck pulled up. Then we lost the game because the people loading Bubba were too exposed. It won’t happen again. I stack the barrels up and then take my place on the perimeter. It takes 30 minutes. The enemy come running behind the truck as it trundles down the road, using it for cover and throwing out smoke grenades like candy from a parade. Blue team wises up and starts shooting their feet out through the small space underneath the truck. We load Bubba and Gump without even having to tighten the perimeter.

The final game I load all my paint. I had about 500 rounds left which I will be hard pressed to put through the Maverick in 45 minutes. I sprint off the whistle to the center fort and manage to shoot the key man and his two escorts who never suspect anyone will sprint. I’ve explained tapeline running to the Unit. They do it the entire game, running the edges of the field to get behind the enemy base. With 2 minutes left, as the Reds struggle to hold the extraction zone, Peter, Albin and Buzz wait for their final respawn to leave Red Base. Then they stand up, covered in moss, and mow down all the newly inserted players. We nearly manage to overrun the extraction but the last 3 Reds manage to throw Bubba in threw a side door. Even though they get eliminated immediately after, the dummies are saved.

At the end of the day its a Draw. Both teams have won an equal number of rounds. We grill some sausage and have a few beers. The helicopter heads for home. My ears are still ringing a bit from the bombs and my brain is tired from having to translate Swedish commands all day, but I suppose stress-learning the language is a good thing. Peter and the boys talk about heading to the U.S. in the summer for a few games. ION at Skirmish or Castle Conquest at EMR. They want to play against more than 50 people for a change. There’s something to be said for being in a huge game, the sheer scale of the U.S. scenario world. But they have good thing going here. Their sport is growing here, rapidly. They are not limited by insurance regulations, and they have great terrain at fields that continually improve themselves. We’ll see. Maybe a Swedish invasion of America is due in July or August. Until then, maybe I can introduce them to tanks and LAWS.

I wonder if IKEA sells Nerf rockets….