This is the business that took over from Panther Family Laser Tag. The arena and equipment are pretty much the same. They painted the walls in the lobby with some new super-hero murals and added a couple of video games in the lobby.
As far as I can tell, they still do the birthday party events on weekends. We did several with my kids at Panther over the years, and it appears they're continuing that business.
At some point, we decided we didn't want the pizza and soda that they served for the birthday parties, so we tried just going on a Saturday with the group of my son's friends for his birthday, but doing the "party" part of the celebration somewhere else. That was a mistake. The birthday parties got priority in the arena, and they worked on squeezing us in here and there. We spent a lot of time sitting around waiting, and it took us like 3 hours to get 3 games in.
New strategy: We really like the Friday and Saturday unlimited laser tag in the evenings. For two birthdays now, we've started the celebration at a favorite restaurant somewhere nearby, and then come here for unlimited laser tag afterwards. You need to play 3 games to get your money's worth on the unlimited laser tag price, and both years we've done this, my boys played 5 or 6 games between about 7:30 p.m. and 11 p.m. and definitely got our money's worth price-per-game wise.
My impression is that the business is not investing in maintaining the gear. Multiple vests and blasters weren't working last time we were there.
We have been to a couple of similar style laser tag arenas in VA and MA, and other arenas allow you to pick a user name and keep track of your statistics and give you print outs of your game results, etc. It appears the system here has that functionality, but they just don't use it. All of the blasters have a pre-programmed user name, and you just have to remember which user name you were on THAT game and look at your stats on the screen after the game is over, but you can't track your stats over multiple games.
The other thing to watch out for are the "ringers." Last year, there was one "kid" (teenager with a scruffy beard) who clearly has way too much time on his hands and plays laser tag all the time and was just massacring all of us. He was kind of annoying. This year, it was one of the game masters (employee who is supposed to be a referee) who has clearly played a lot and is an expert marksman with the gear and was killing all of us all over the arena as a team of one. I guess I would ask next time that the game master just be a referee and not play. read more