My problem with paintball

Last weekend I went to a friend's stag weekend back home in Birmingham. The main event during the day was paintballing in a small forrest near Kidderminster. I'd never been before, but it sounded like a right laugh. The first challenge was making it to the site for 9am. Once we had signed the legal waivers (not a good sign) and were suited p in the most faded cammo gear ever, we were taken through our safety drills, split into teams and lead into combat. The first game was set in a very small 30' square zone with triangluar blockades around a central wall were our objective, a flag, was located. Of course, with 30 players casualties were quick to rack up. Before the game started I did notice how most other groups had brought heavily armoured gloves. Of course, I took the first round to the hand and a lot of swearing followed. Now in paintball, because they didn't want us shooting each other in the head, head shots don't count as a kill. Of course, when everyone's dug in, all anyone sees are heads poking out. This is a round about way of saying I took the second shot to the face, which included ingesting most of a paintball. I wasn't even "dead" yet, but a volley as soon as I stepped out put an end to my alive status. The second game was a more traditional attack/defend objective. This time, I dug in and took out a load of defenders before a last second dive for the flag earned me a volley from 4 defenders I didn't even know where there. With the roles reversed, I'm proud to say that not only did we also defend the base, but I took out lots of their players and wasn't hit at all!
The third game was a bit of a puzzle. All the other games had some kind of strategy. This one require someone to sit on a chair with only a barrel for defence for 10 seconds whilst being pelted. Their guy got off quite lightly, but our guy took an absolute pasting and once the 10 count was over crumpled to the floor. A few minutes after arriving back at base camp, half his body had visibly swelled. The look of concern on the marshalls' faces reminded me why we'd had to sign a disclaimer.
More conventional battles took place over a variety of terrains until we finally ran out of paintballs. It was this point that I took another round straight in the face. This time yellow immediately sprayed into my vision and images of the one-epsiode of Byker Grove I watched sped through my mind. I collapsed back , and slightly raised my visor to spit and out came half a paintball - casing and all. I then took a proper body hit and was eliminated. For the next 10 minutes I was spitting yellow. Finally returning to base camp, I removed my visor to see that: yes, paint had indeed sprayed up into the inside of the safety device...
The rest of the day was spent trying to avoid touching any bruises. Although the stinging pain of being hit faded after 5 seconds, I'm left with some impressive battle scars. Overall a great experience that couled be improved by taking more people you know and not getting hit as often!