Tag Archives: Water wars

Water Wars

A game played by the students at my informant’s high school. The rules are as follows:

$5.00 cost to enter the game, which is organized on Facebook. Everyone splits up into teams of two and attempts to spray the others with water guns. The game is played out over several weeks, with players trying to assassinate each other in the hopes of winning the pot made up of all the entrance fee money.

Players’ homes, cars, and the school parking lot are considered safe zones. Everything operates on the honor code, with players honestly communicating whether they’re “assassinated.”

Players have a tendency to get highly invested in the game’s outcome, leading to inventive and extreme scenarios. For example:

–A boy dressing up in a girl’s outfit to provide a decoy.

–Jumping off a roof to escape a 9:00 AM siege and get to school on time.

–Using a dry ice bomb to lure a player out of his home with an explosion in his front yard (leading to police involvement and a year’s ban on the game).

Not much lurking beneath the surface here, as the reasons for the game’s existence seem to be for fun and profit. Assassin games like this certainly aren’t uncommon, but this might be the most organized example I’ve heard of, and certainly the only one played for actual cash. Impressive, really.