Drink Rum

So... as the subject states, I'm back.

I spent a week at the beach doing beachy things. Sun, sand, surf, etc. If etc began with an "s" I'd have had some handy aliteration going on there, but alas English has thwarted me again. I probably misspelled aliteration.

While at the beach, my wife noticed an ad for something called MagiQuest. The ad was something like, "Take your magic wand and perform daring feats of magic and blah blah blah". I translated that into "take you magic putter and make your magic ball fly along the magic green carpet and disappear in a magic portal aka hole." I wasn't down with fantasty mini golf. Not when there were several other pirate themed mini golf places complete with ships, cannons, and Johnny Depp lookalikes.

But one night we happened upon this place. And decided to go in. It wasn't miniature golf. I don't know how to describe it other than it was basically a hybrid of a Harry Potter movie, World of Warcraft, and a LARP.

You got a wand. (Not a putter much to my surprise.) There were different styles of wands and I chose brown. Boring brown. You then had to pick a clan to join. My wife chose some sort of tree hugging hippie sounding clan and I chose the Shadow clan. Because it sounded cool.

So after you get your wand and clan designation you have to pay. You have to buy the wand... because no good wizard type would rent a wand I guess. You also pay by the hour to play the game. The game is basically 13 quests and 5 adventures. That's what I was told anyway by a very pale teen behind the counter. I asked him if I would get the opportunity to kill my wife in the game... since she was a hippie and I was a dark shadow guy. He said no. I then asked if I'd be given the opportunity to kill any of the multitude of children lining up behind me. He said no again. The lack of PvP in the game was already bothering me.

Then off to training. Yeah, this thing actually required a tutorial. To break it down... the wand had an electronic eye and an RFID. To get the eye to transmit, you had to sling it at your target... the battery would make contact in the wand due to the force of motion. You could sling it like Harry Potter and get it to fire, but I found that holding it point down and coming at my target like Norman Bates in the shower worked just as well.

You went to this stone henge looking thing and a Gandalf looking guy would give you quests and what not. Then you ran around inside this big place complete with castles, tree houses, crypts, etc finding items and such. I got lost and wandered into a room that had a sleeping dragon in it. I left. I figured I wasn't supposed to be there. The big dragon was a projection on a screen. He was one of many. The interaction with the projections reminded me a great deal of the old Dragon's Lair video game.

So we ran around collecting stuff and completed a few quests in the hour we'd payed for. I also hit a kid in the head with my wand. He deserved it.

There were some live action "characters" in there too, but they had little to do and could be avoided. They were people clearly lost without a Renfest to visit every weekend.

The play was cheesy, but addictive. We ended up going back to finish some quests.

We never did fight the dragon though.

Later I found out there was a PvP area, but it was populated with 12-13 year olds that were MagiQuest professionals and they would have killed me repeatedly... at least until I started punting them.

More on the beach trip later.