I have to say, of all the paintball I have played, the indoor paintball I played in a boarded up old house was my favorite of all time. 

Sure arenas and capture the flag are fun, outdoor has its place, but good old fashioned sneaking around in the dark chalking up kills is the way I like it! 

My favorite place burned down a few years ago, but I still remember it well. 

It wasn’t so much an indoor paintball arena as much as it was a cool old house with sniper holes, walls knocked down, and barricades in strange places. 

Oh, and they built a ramp in the back of the house to get back to the first floor!

We usually started at two ends of this house, and the paintballs only started flying when the music started.  They kept the music loud, so it was easy to sneak through the parts of the house where the speakers were... mostly around the stairs to discourage campers. 

I think there was even a strobe light in the front stair area, until we came back one time and a stray paintball had knocked the light out and it was never replaced! 

The entire house was carpeted in the large rooms, which was gross because all the paintballs we dropped (and the cheap paintballs that didn’t break on impact) got squished into the carpet.  The ramp had carpet in it, even though it was made of plywood, and that was the greasy mess you would imagine it to be. 

Many paintballs stained the walls at the top and bottom of the ramp, leading me to the conclusion that I never wanted to get stuck in the middle of that thing when someone was hiding in the dark at either end.  I started down the ramp with a buddy one time, and he got shot up pretty bad while I retreated quickly… never to return to the ramp! 

I remember there was a huge bunker made of tires at the top of the ramp that offered a lot of protection… but those that did so were seldom aware that all of the bedrooms to either side had an intricate path cut through the closets that made a flanking maneuver ideal.

The sniper holes were always in weird places to me, but I remember the day I took 4 paintballs to the back because we were cornered into a hall closet, and as I turned to run someone stuck his gun through the hall sniper hole and just opened up on whoever was there… me!  Getting shot in the back with MANY paintballs and not being able to move is really a terrible way to go out of the game, let me tell you.

Right before the house burned I remember going back to play again with some guys I had never played with, not my usually Friday Paintball Crew.  I was excited to be back, but I had a surprise: the new owner had cut A LOT of new doors through the entire house. 

So it was more like a two story paintball arena than the cool old hunt-and-seek house that I remembered.  It burned down soon after that, I have never quite seen another like it.

From Indoor Paintball back to Paintball Tips

From Indoor Paintball back to Paintball Parks