Armored Combat Suit League of New England, 2006

We each loaded up with 2 "freaky friday" batteries and one saturn missile battery, as well as four roman candles, and stomped to the top of Combat Hill where we fought amongst a much-improved-over-last-year (but still pretty lame) City of Stupopolis. Two of my roman candles were mounted on a sword, two on my right arm (also the sword arm). My other arm had a built-in shield which acted as a great place to load up the three batteries -- or so I thought. Little did I know that if you tipped a saturn battery over, the missiles fall out! So I had to walk around with my arm pointing straight up until the saturn was lit, not easy with the weight of the armor, the shield, and all those fireworks.

For round one, we each had a mini-flare to light our ordinance with. This, combined with the not-quite-total darkness of early dusk, made the combat much different from round two, where small butane lighters took the place of the flares and darkness was complete. Also, in round one, TW painted me with a paintball gun (a surprise addition that is technically legal, according to the ACSLNE rules, but which he mercifully abandoned for round two after I explained how fun it was on the receiving end of frozen-paintball-hell). The bursts of CO2 against the firework flare looks great on tape, though, so I say it's well worth a few bruised knuckles. The shield helped about 0%, as my hand was on the other side of the shield and my gloved fingers were the only place that it actually hurt to get hit. Oh well. Live and learn.

Round two was much different in terms of play. First, without the benefit of the flares, you couldn't see who you were shooting unless a firework was actually discharging. We'd both learned to move about more, also, so it was a more dynamic fight. The saturn batteries (which were voted to be the least accurate) were abandoned and a super-stallion battery was put in its place. The super stallion is a bigger class of firework, so it was pretty impressive. I ditched the sword (too heavy) and TW ditched the gun. It was all-fire combat that lasted for what seemed to be an eternity, and I was so tired by the end of it (its hard to breathe in all that stuff, never mind running through crusty snow and fighting at the same time) that I could barely stand for round three...

Round three was unarmed - that is, once the final rounds were spent in round two, we both started fighting hand-to-hand. Wow - its a unique experience to get punched in the face while wearing a full-face motorcycle helmet. We grappled for a bit and then both rolled ass-over-elbows all the way down the hill.

The verdict: a success!!! Scoring was difficult, but we are both victors in my book - after all, we were the only ones with enough courage and duct tape to brave the wintery summit of Combat Hill and fight like giant robot men. Huzzah!

[no pictures yet, but we do have digital video footage and photos, which I will upload as soon as I can]