Boss Paintball (www.BossProShops.com) and E.P.I.C Unit (www.epicunit.com) produced Operation: Shining Shield on Saturday, January 26th, 2008. I had been playing at Boss for a few weeks preceding the scenario and had been listening to the field sponsored team, E.P.I.C Unit, talk up the event. It was essentially American Forces against Korean forces. Two weeks prior to the event, they were still pushing it and it sounded like only 40 people had signed up at that time and they were offering free t-shirts to the first 100 people to sign up. When asked, they said that they expected between 100-110. You could almost hear the underlying tone in their voices that finished the answer with “we hope”. The week before the event it was rainy and cold and pretty much no one played that week and I had totally  let the event slip my mind. I had fully intended to pre-register (hey, who doesn’t love a free t-shirt?!). Of course, I forgot until the morning of the event and showed up a little before the recommended 8am for a 9am start.

Instead of 110 players, over 250 showed up to start World War III…

Let’s just say that the producers were as surprised as I was, but to their credit, everything pretty much went smoothly. Most people had pre-registered. I heard they pre-registered 150 players on the day before. The line for the pre-registrants to pick up their credentials and get signed in was fairly long, but for us morons who didn’t, I walked right to the front! The punch line was, I was one of the last to be able to register before they simply cut it off. 

The game actually did get started about 10am with chronographing the guns taking longer than usual due to the lines. Paintballs were in good supply as Boss Pro Shops had in brought it in by the van loads.  They had selected a good paint for the weather conditions, it started out at 35 degrees and quickly got into the high 50’s and low 60’s.

Once the games got off to a start, I would give EPIC and Boss good marks for running a well managed scenario. Of the 250+ players, quite a few of them were from organized teams such as Boxer, Command Decision’s ODX, Palmetto Hill’s team [enter your own name here as I am not sure what they are going by this week], Rogue Cell, and others. (See my rant about teams and big scenarios) The lines for food (which was included in the price, a nice touch) was waaaay too loing for my patience level, so I skipped it, but the burgers and hotdogs looked pretty good.

 The highlight of the scenario were the tanks and nerve gas attacks (orange smoke). One of these, an actual tank, had a funny moment when it tried to turn the turret around in time to defend against another advancing tank and kept smacking the turret into sapling trees they couldn’t see from inside the tank. Actually it would have been funnier had the tank not been on our side and we watched as the opposing tank approached closer and closer with it’s machine guns hammering. They eventually did get the turret around in time and made short work of the incoming tank, but for a few minutes you had to wonder whose side the tree was on.

As paintball scenarios go, it went off pretty well. Cheating (wiping paint and not returning to the reinsertion spot) were penalized by a reduction in team points. Our team (the Koreans), were crushing the American forces, but a few cheaters on our team costs us hundreds of points.  We ended up losing by 20 points. C’est la guerre.

All in all it was a good scenario and EPIC Unit should be proud of the production. They plan the sequel sometime this summer.