Paintball has many forms, and is many things to many people:

• Paintball is the fastest growing extreme sport, and is now bigger than snowboarding (in the US).
• Paintball is a chance to stitch up your mate who's just about to get married.
• Paintball is a fantastic corporate day out, either as a team building exercise, just a muck-about for staff, or a thank-you to a big client.
• Paintball is fast becoming THE way to spend your birthday, whether it's your 12^th or ^60th.
• Paintball is just a good laugh, and the best way I know of to de-stress once in a while.

Paintball does, however, have it's many bad images. Some things paintball isn't:

Paintball isn't an underground terrorist Rambo training school.

Paintball doesn't encourage people to take up shooting at other folks with real weapons (if anything, it teaches respect for 'real' weapons - you can't wipe off a .22 calibre bullet).

Paintball doesn't discriminate on the grounds of sex, colour, age, (most) disabilities (as long as you can carry and aim you paintgun, you should be able to play somewhere), or the language you speak. It doesn't even matter who has the biggest weapon! ;-D

In it's most basic form, a game of paintball goes a little something like this:

Team 'A' starts from Base 'A', Team 'B' at Base 'B' (not rocket science so far). Each team has a flag (let's call them 'A' and 'B'). Within a certain amount of time (between 5 and 20 minutes), Team 'A' must try and get Flag 'B' to Base 'A', while Team 'B' must get Flag 'A' to Base 'B'. Pretty simple really, and a whole load more fun than i just made it sound. This type of game is commonly called a "Standard Flag" game. There is a variation on this, known as a 'Reverse Flag' game, where Team 'A' must get Flag 'A' into Base 'B', and vice-versa.

Another common type of game is called the "Center Flag" game. This is where there is only one flag - usually in the middle of the field, and once a team has control of this flag, they must place it in the oppositions base. The flag can move between the teams if the flag carrier is shot, who-ever picks up the flag has control.

If you go and play at any decent site (and most useless ones) you will find all sorts of other games, usually based around villages, forts, bridges, helicopters, swamps, tournament fields, you name it, you'll be able to find it out there somewhere (probably in America). There are too many variations of games to go into here, and I wouldn't want to remove all of the suprises from your day, would I?