Squirt-Gun Assassins

This year's StreetWars tournament is in full swing in New York City. It is a shadowy sport (previously at Neatorama) in which participants are directed to kill each other off -with squirt guns! Players are directed to find their "target" (another player) and eliminate them. Then they inherit their victim's target.
StreetWars was created in 2004 by Franz Aliquo, then a 28-year-old securities lawyer, as a cure for a boredom phase he was working through. Mr. Aliquo named himself Supreme Commander and, with a friend known as Mustache Commander and other helpers, has held several killing tournaments in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, London and Paris. The game resembles the 1980s campus phenomenon Assassin, itself a reminder of the 1985 film “Gotcha!” starring Anthony Edwards and his paintball gun.

The contestants are mostly in their 20s or early 30s, from what could be called the kickball set; about 35 percent in the current war are women. “We had a 76-year-old grandmother in San Francisco,” said Mr. Aliquo, who lives in Long Island City, Queens, and now is the events director at Thrillist.com, a Web site that distributes daily e-mailed lists of events in various cities. “She got two kills.”

250 participants began the tournament earlier this month; 16 now survive. Tomorrow, the sudden death round begins, where everyone tries to kill everyone else. Read about the adventures of various players in the New York Times. Link -via Digg

(image credit: David Golman/New York Times)

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I used to run this exact game in high school. We called it killer (it was one of the first published live action rollplaying games I think). We also allowed for things like car bombs (toilet paper tubes taped to the bottem of the car), animal attacks (I had some one hide in a closet in a gorrila suite and jump out and "kill" the guy), and poisend food (usealy a few drops of food coloring). How these kills were verified is a longer post, but we got by.
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Anyone ever seen the movie Big Trouble? Near the beginning of the movie high school kids are playing an extremely similar game, down to using squirt guns. It was released in 2002.
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Looks like fun, however, I can't imagine how you have to explain to a Cop why you were carrying a water gun in the middle of the city spraying someone.
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