It's all fun and games until someone gets competitive...

Every Tuesday and Friday night starting at 8pm, Archers Arena hosts a “community night” where those who want to become effective combat archers can learn the skills!

Archers Arena is home to Archery tag and Nerf Wars and while both are incredibly fun and rewarding, it also happens to be particularly challenging when looking to compete within the sport.  Yes, you can compete in the sport and that’s what todays blog is about. COMPETITION!!

Now for today’s topic, I’m going to be talking primarily about Archery tag over Nerf Wars because as fun as Nerf Wars is, it’s incredibly difficult to monitor and ref a competitive game of nerf wars vs archery tag, also, archery tag has a very high skill curve (and a very rewarding one as well) that develops quickly when playing and has apparently no end. 

The art of archery has been around since seemingly the dawn of time where mankind learned the pointy end of the stick hurts, bows and arrows were made shortly thereafter.  The concept of the bow and arrows is simple, the limbs of the bow create tension on a string that is used to launch a pointy stick at your enemy so with such a simple concept, how difficult can the sport be? Well since I’ve worked for archers arena, the answer is staggering. The difference between a pro archer and an amateur is just as big a gap as a pro and amateur boxer or swimmer. 

The first layer to the competitive nature of archery is speed (that’s right, not accuracy but speed).  I’ve been a boxer for most of my youth and I’ve learned that in ALL my combat sports experience, speed kills and archery tag is no exception.  The ability to move nimbly and dodge incoming arrows all while launching a volley of arrows strikes yourself has proven time and time to trump slower players.  Accuracy IS king in the sense of “what’s the point of speed if you can’t hit your target?” but the truth is, I’ll take a slightly faster player over a slightly more accurate player any day.

Catching. Yes you can catch arrows in archery tag and we have some players that are crazy good at it. Catching an arrows not only negates the damage of an arrow AND depletes the enemy of their arrow resources but it also has some BIG added effect in all games that we play (even the highest level competitive games).  I’ve seen the classic 1 vs. many scenario so many times won by the underdog player because of a well anticipated catch. Catching > dodging. Always.

There is a plethora of skills to learn to be an effective combat archer like a fast quick draw (picking up an arrow and firing it as fast as possible), holding multiple arrows, team strategy and synchronization and resource (arrow) acquisition but these are skills ill touch up on another day.