ZOMBIE DODGEBALL

At the meeting for November 9th, there wasn't all that much to do for the scouts. The most important thing that was on the "to do" list was that the scouts needed to finish the planning and equipment sign-out for the upcomming Color Wars campout. The sheets for these actions had run out before the previous meeting, so more needed to be made.

When that was done with, the next activity was something of a surprise: it was the first event for Color Wars! This event was simple: each patrol would be a team, with all patrols competing against each other in a relay. However, instead of simply running around a track with a little stick, here the objective was to tie a specified knot in front of a "referee" before running back to the rest of the patrol and tagging the next person to go off. While one would have expected the oldest scouts, the Duct Tape patrol, to have easily won the challenge, there were only two scouts who actually ran the relay because all the other members were off doing someting more important or being one of the referees for other patrols.

Instead, the winners were, surprisingly, the Kodiaks, who are the second oldest patrol. Runners up were Flaming Arrows and the Thrashing sharks, the two youngest patrols. Points will be awarded to them at color wars for placing among the top three. On the other side of things, the Falcon patrol was told they might be instead getting a penalty because they kept on needing multiple people to tie the knots, having as many as five people up at once.

Because of the relative speed that everything on the agenda had been done so quickly, that left a large timeslot for the game. It was dodgeball, again, but thanks to the large amount of playtime the variant that was played was something new: Zombie Dodgeball!

It's something like this, only in a church, has dodgeballs, and nobody's actually dead

The same basic rules of dodgeball apply: throw balls at other people, avoid the balls they throw back, and if you catch a ball the thrower is out. What changes with Zombie Dodgeball is that in the cases of getting "out"; getting hit with a ball or someone catches the ball you just threw, players instead switch sides. This is a more "playtime-friendly" version in that nobody is forced to sit out of the game at any time (unless they engage in frouned-upon behavior, like usual), they just change teams and keep playing until only one team remains. Obviously, the fact getting hit only changes the people that you play with proved very popular with the scouts, as they do NOT like sitting out of a good dogeball game.

Also, partly because the more-flexible rules allowed it, it was observed that many aspects of the gameplay also went up statistically. With Zombie Dodgeball, it was noted that there was an increase of:

- 75% more headshots

- 33% more "Accidental" hits

-25% more "human hostages as shields" occurances, and

- 100%+ in totally incoherent screaming.

In addition, SPL Alex R. got so into the game that he assumed his new alter ego: "The Priest"

An artist's renditon of Alex as "The Priest" (and yes, that's a dodgeball on fire he's throwing)

After a while, the game was reset to a normal game of Dodgeball when it was realized that there would never be an end to the game because it was too easy to hit people when the threat of not playing wasn't applied. Even with some scouts now doing some benchwarming in "jail", it was still a fun game.

Finally, when the Troop was at last circled up, Johnathan Rholdeder was awarded his Eagle Scout badge, the latest in a long line of Troop 281 Eagles. There is hardly a better way to end a meeting then to set an Eagle Scout flying.