Players of War (Pow) Airsoft

[Rogerborg]

A woodland site near Falkirk, Scotland, between Glasgow and Edinburgh.

 

https://www.playersofwar.co.uk/

 

https://www.facebook.com/PlayersofWar/

 

Pros:

• A decent sized woodland site with a good mix of planted trees, cleared areas, natural woodland, streams, hills, all the good stuff.  Still playable despite very heavy rain.
• Lots of build work and cover.  A township, station platform, MASH tent, artillery structures, lots of wooden and plastic screens in the woods.
• A big car park (two actually), with good traffic direction, and a vast safe zone with covered tables and long book in / shop zone.
• Clear objectives given, for those that wanted to listen.  Whistles to start and end games, great.  Good clear shouts of man down / cease fire / play on.
• Well administrated with clear published rules and prices, pay up front or pay on the day, and pictures taken of players at registration.
• A fair amount of WW2 historical players giving the place a bit of class.
• Great on site catering, with a large cooked-food joint offering proper meals.

 

Cons:

• Single-track roads loading to the site. If coming from the West I'd continue on to High Bonnybridge rather than following a satnav directly in from the West, that's proper hillbilly stuff.
• A late start, and the brief had the requisite haranguing about late arrivals, littering, all the stuff that the people actually doing it don't care about.  Why bother?
• Too much owner banter and faffing around at sign in, while people are standing waiting.
• Idiomatic rules. Ricochets and BBs falling out the sky count, weird fps limits (360 / 485), gun hits take out the gun, no sniping until you've played twice (in principle, but...)
• Voluntary chronoing with no tags, and no chronoing in game that I saw, despite the usual dire warnings.  You could have walked on with anything you wanted.  I didn't see any test shots either.
• Too many players for the "bomb the $PLACE / grab the $THING" objectives in every game: it was almost impossible to push them due to the volume of fire and all the games bar one timed out.
• Teams were marked with a thin strip of tape on one arm. Combined with the number of players there was way too much friendly fire, some of which was ignored.  Because...
• Nowhere near enough marshals for the number of players and size of site.  Only three were pointed out, no hi-vis or other marking, they could really only oversee the objectives leaving everything in between as a free-for-all.
• Good play in the morning, but an increasing amount of God Mode as the day drew to a close and folk just wanted to mag dump rather than slog through the streams.

 

Did I enjoy it? Yes, I did.  It's a decent site, the folk running it aren't tossers, the marshalling was friendly enough, and the play was mostly good natured with shouts of "Good shot" and "Thank you".  With car sharing discouraged, there were loads of vehicles there but the site coped.  It was also still playable even after very heavy rain.  The catering was excellent.

 

I doubt that any of the parts that I didn't like are going to change - they've been doing this for a while and know how they want to run the site.  And they're far from specific to this site, I mention them just for completeness and comparison.

 

Worth a try, but a bit far and remote for me to make it a regular place.