-Hi, I’m Luke.
Today on out of darts, we just got back from Maryland Mayhem:
A three-day event that was an absolute blast.
Let's get going!
[music]
-Team Smog, are you ready?
-Toxic!
[music]
-We’ve got one in the cross!
[music]
-Snake! Snake! Snake! Snake! Snake!
[music]
-…Let’s get it!
…good slide!
Keep it tight! Keep it tight!
[music]
-You are now in a 10-minute hold!
[music]
-What do we want?
-Brains!
-When do we want them?
-Brains!
-Go!
[music]
-You get her?
You get her‽
no‽
Sock! Sock! Sock! Sock!
[music]
We need to move!
Eli! Eli, move!
[music]
-Just remember, you're joining the winning side.
-Welcome to the horde.
-2023 was the first Maryland Mayhem, although they did run an HvZ event last year,
which several of my friends attended and told me was a great event which gave me the confidence
to sponsor this year's event.
We were really happy to be there throughout the entire weekend.
I brought along Perry, our social media and video guy, and he was able to play as well
and partake in the whole weekend of festivities.
Before I go any further, I really want to just say a huge thank you to all of the event’s
sponsors and attendees, and especially the staff that put it together:
Neil for organizing everything, dart sweep for running Sunday, and I’m sure I’m forgetting
just dozens of names that I should have included here, but…
Thank you, thank you for running these events.
Without volunteers and a lot of hours and labor and time, there's really no way these
events would happen.
Maryland Mayhem was a three-day event.
Day one included a competitive nerf game and a little mini-convention where we had a variety
of different vendors available.
Day two was an all-day long HvZ, and day three was a standard super stock game at an outdoor
field.
My blaster of choice for the entire weekend of games was Momentum, and I know people are
just dying to hear more about this blaster.
I ran both Momentum and our brand-new Koda mags, both designed by the legendary Eli Wu.
Thank you, thank you, Eli, for rebuilding this brand-new version for me right before
the tournament.
I got to run this all weekend long, and it never let me down.
I had not a single jam, not a single failure; it just works.
Really legendary performance all around, and I had a really good time.
Day one was a competitive nerf game, and that was a quick-flag style game.
We had 13 teams.
I competed on Team Smog, and we took second place, and I have to say it was a really lovely
competition.
I felt like everybody had a really good time.
We had a really fair game and a lot of good sportsmanship all around and a lot of good,
just warm fuzzy feelings from playing.
We had to play really hard to get second place.
Ultimately team Magic Smoke came out on top, and they definitely deserved that win in a
really tight final match.
Now I’ve played a number of competitive matches and different game types, and this
one was really a lot of fun.
It really brought me back to my speedball days; there were lots of opportunities to
play really aggressively and rush really hard.
The games did not last very long.
They had a three-minute timer, and I found that a lot of the games only lasted about
a minute - minute and a half.
Some of them went the full three minutes, but it really depended on the play style of
the two teams.
The brackets were arranged in a round-robin so that the 13 teams all competed to get rankings.
Then the top group of teams got a buy to pass straight on to the quarterfinals, semifinals,
and then the final finals.
We made it, of course, all the way to the end and took second place, but it was definitely
a challenge all the way through.
There's a center flag in this game type, and the center flag gets you two points -- if
you can get it to your opponent's line, and each elimination of a player gets you one
point.
So, in the first half of the day, there was this fun magic and mystique of trying to figure
out how many points do we have, where we were on the leaderboard and are we going to rank,
and how many points do we need to get in this match.
It made the playstyle a little bit different.
You had to actually think about how many points you wanted to get out of the match because
fully eliminating the other team might not be as advantageous if you also lose too many
of your own.
You might want to control how many points your opponent gets, and it made for a really
interesting morning.
The field was great; it was an indoor soccer field, though I will say it was pretty gnarly
when you do fall on that.
I played in shorts and this jersey, and I definitely took home some scars, which are
at least healing, thankfully.
You find as you get older, you don't heal as fast.
This has been over two weeks, and I still have this nice patch on my arm, but it was
definitely reminiscent of paintball days playing on astroturf.
However, thankfully it wasn't also super slippery full of paint.
The team I played on consisted of: King of Games Zelkos, Rogue Contra, Eli Wu, Beret
(also known as my buddy, Brett), and myself.
And then Perry was our “seventh member” as an extra coach person and supporting position.
Perry also ran the booth during the little convention -- we'll talk more about that in
a minute.
It was really great playing with these guys.
I played with a few of them selectively here and there but not together as one team, so
it was a new experience showing up, playing our hardest, trying to organize, and do our
best.
Ultimately we had a really good time, and I would love to play with these guys again
if I get the opportunity.
Simultaneously on Friday was the convention.
Now we had a little booth showing off some of our latest products showing off the Koda
magazines, and a few other products that we are currently printing.
There were about 15 other vendors, and it was a really nice opportunity to see what
other people had been up to as well as meet some of our other friendly competitors from
all around the country, and I always really enjoy that.
In fact, I wanted more time at the convention side of things, but I was also competing,
so I couldn't really bounce back and forth as much as I wanted to
Day two was Saturday, and Saturday kicked off HvZ, also known as humans vs zombies for
those who haven't played before.
Humans vs zombies is a game where most everybody starts as a human, and if you get touched
or tagged by a zombie, like a game of tag, you turn into a zombie.
You start off with very few number of zombies, and by the end of the day, you generally have
all zombies.
The game set a new record for their attendance at around 350 people, and I felt like it was
a really well-run game, especially considering we were over double their previous record
for the sheer number of people they had to manage.
I really liked that they had different mod groups set up where different groups were
doing different missions completely, and those missions would frequently intertwine.
One fun little mission was using semaphore -- which is a flag language or flag spelling,
and Perry was pretty involved in that.
We had to signal from our ship to another ship a message, and that would get us to our
next task.
I had a really good time.
Perry actually survived nearly to the end, and I think I’ve got it on camera.
Hopefully, we're showing it here where I failed to even react fast enough to save him.
I feel like I could have saved him.
Sorry, Perry.
Oh no!
Shoot!
Dang, I saw him too late, Perry; sorry.
I eventually also got turned zombie.
I, unfortunately, am foolish, and I’m terrible at running my camera.
So, in probably what was the 10 or 15 minutes of the best HvZ play I’ve ever had, I’m
embarrassed to say I wasn't rolling the camera.
We had this great situation: We were going down this aisle, and there were all these
nooks and crannies, and we basically had to punch our way back through a bunch of zombies.
They're on a couple-minute respawn timer; we’re tagging people out; it’s pure chaos,
and then this one kid, much younger than me, came through and tagged me.
I gave him a Koda mag as a victory trophy, and he did have me sign that and write “I
killed out of darts,” or something like that on it, which was pretty cool.
We had a really good time.
I've definitely got to get better at rolling my camera and making sure the battery doesn't
die and whatnot, but it was a really enjoyable HvZ event.
I always like HvZ.
You're running around, and it's just –
My heart always gets pumping.
One thing to always keep in mind is it is a little bit of a contact sport at times.
I did come down this slope at one point.
We’ve got this on camera, too; I definitely was rolling.
It had started to rain, and I came down onto some stamped concrete.
It's basically like polished concrete; it's smoother.
And I totally ate it, and I thought I was going to be out for the day.
But my team around me people around me were nice enough to help me up guard me and let
me limp around, and after about 15 minutes of limping, my legs started feeling pretty
good.
It is still sore at the knee two weeks later three weeks later.
So yeah, to be careful out there, especially in the rain.
We did get rained out for part of the day, but it was really no more than 45 minutes
to an hour delay so
Ultimately it didn't impact our game that much.
One thing I did want to mention here that bugged me was a complete lack of dart sweeping
by a lot of other players.
I hate calling people out like that, but I basically forced Perry and some of my other
buddies to pick up darts, and I picked up darts for about an hour and 45 minutes.
We were picking up garbage bags full of darts, and there were hundreds of people standing
around, so I think it's really reasonable to ask all of the players to spend time picking
up darts because we're playing on a college campus that is gracious enough to let us be
there and let us use the facility.
I do know that they have a club there that was intending to pick it up the next day,
but I don't know that a 30-person club or 50-person club is used to picking up darts
from a 350-person HvZ game.
The sheer number of darts that were out there that we were picking up was just mind-blowing.
Many hands make light work, and it's my opinion that at any game you go to, you should be
helpful and make sure you're not contributing to the mess or the problem.
If you're running a proton pack, please pick up your two or three four thousand rounds.
Don't just leave them all there.
I think it's a really nice courtesy, and it ensures that we get to keep having these games
in the future.
One other scheduling thing that I really think could have been improved, and this is one
of my other small pieces of feedback, is that the day we were playing HvZ was also New Student
Day.
So, at times there were literally hundreds of non-players walking around, which definitely
caused some issues here and there.
I tried to be good about talking to strangers and being very approachable and warm rather
than being a little terrifying because sometimes groups of humans come running around screaming,
and whatnot can give the wrong look.
I would highly suggest in the future, if it's at all possible, not running this on any day
where you're going to have so many new students -- or just non-players there in general.
But this is part of the college season.
It's the middle of the school year, so I do understand there are only so many weekends
available that they can actually book this campus.
Day three, I finally got to sleep in, and that was very nice.
We managed to keep staying up far too late because there were a lot of good friends I
hadn't seen in a while.
Both Eli and Brett are not local to me, but they're good friends, and it's nice to hang
out, so there were a lot of late-night hangouts compared to my normal life as a dad, and ultimately
we didn't get as much sleep as I thought I might on the trip.
But Sunday morning, the game was pretty late; it didn't start till the afternoon.
So, we had a nice vendor brunch and then ultimately went out for the super stock game.
Now the super stock game was absolutely crazy.
It was in this big field -- a nice flat field by a church, and the weather was just perfect.
It was really nice out, and there were tons of bunkers, but there were so many people
playing that people had to double and triple up on the bunkers.
But it made for a lot of targets to fire at, so hopefully, we've got some good footage
there.
I really had a good time putting momentum through its paces, meeting tons of new and
old friends, and just getting out there, seeing the community, and seeing what people have
been working on
The whole weekend just left me with a great warm and fuzzy feeling, and I am thrilled
to be part of this hobby and this community.
Thank you again to all of the organizers who put this event on who spent all of their time
and, money, and effort on this weekend to just show us all a good time.
I cannot recommend Maryland Mayhem highly enough, and I will definitely be back and
sponsoring in 2024.
Thank you so much for watching!
Until next time I’m out of darts.
What?
Ha! That would have been bad.