I don’t mean to boast, but that kid in the photo looks like he is definitely going to grow up to be a killer someday (yep, that skinny little kid was me).
There I was as a kid, dirt poor, but very creative. I was having dirt clod wars before I really knew what the word war even meant; like most childhood boy games, they ended when tears began to flow or blood was drawn. Go figure I’d end up in the military; as have two of my brothers, and two brothers in law. We needed some creative release and didn’t have money for paintball guns or pellet rifles so we came up with this game that aided in teaching effective concealment and movement techniques. Believe it or not, my first pair of camouflage pants were some old black Sunday slacks that I had painted green blotches onto. Those were good days; crawling through ditches, thinking I was a commando, face covered from green marker or mud.
So this was our version of tag combined with hide and seek. We played this extensively in sagebrush and areas of scrub brush as it made it more intense than woodland terrain. The first “it” person closes their eyes for 10 seconds giving everyone a chance to hide and then takes up the position of spotter. He can move and tries to find the others. If he finds a ground crawler they swap and the new spotter gives him 10 seconds to conceal himself. The crawlers don’t have to stay stationary, they can move to their hearts content, they just don’t want to get sighted and become the new spotter. Be sure to set parameters on the playing field and a game time limit.
In later years with a little more junk camo and other materials, we would play this in ghillie suites; but a kid starts somewhere. With a good suite we have nearly stepped on each other.
Try it out. Or if you have the funds give a single paintball gun to the spotter and it adds incentive for the crawlers to keep their heads and butts down.
Jon
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