As the tagline for the Kickstarter video says: “How is this not a thing yet?”
Sabertron is a set of foam swords with built in scoring, adding a video game element to the age old pass time of ‘hitting people’. It’s now 150 per cent funded with 19 days left. (Thanks Geekologie!)
Sensors in the hilt communicate between swords, differentiating between blade and body hits and even allow for a range of game modes:
ONE HIT TO WIN IT
Self explanatory. Land one successful body hit, and you win.
COUNTDOWN
Land three hits to win.
METERED DAMAGE
The stronger the blow, the more damage your opponent takes.
ETERNAL STRUGGLE
Identical to Countdown, only you can earn health back over the passage of time, or by blocking several blows.
HOPELESS
The name says it all. Identical to Eternal Struggle, only you can earn health back more quickly, and with even fewer blocks. Also, the lower your health gets, the less damage you’ll take.
At the moment it’s only one-on-one fights but multiplayer’s promised along with shields and armour “around the corner”.
Comments
5 responses to “‘Lasertag With Swords’ Means Pretend Jedi Can Finally Keep Score”
It does already exist…it’s called fencing. Sabre is pretty much exactly the same as this, body hits anywhere along the blade count.
Yes. The point of this being that anyone can play without needing armour, metal swords, or electronic scoring equipment. It’s a pretty great idea.
That already exists as well. The foam and latex weapons used for LARPing might not keep score but they managed to look similar to an actual sword and you don’t need a whole ton of armour and safety equipment.
So what you and Palms are saying is this doesn’t exist but something kind of similar does?
That foam “blade” looks pretty flexi. Looks very breakable, especially if you exert the same amount of force as you normally would with a sword. I really hope its got a bit of weight to it.
It will suffer from the same problems as laser tag, in that there is no fear of getting hit. Not exactly a great sword fighting sim.
If you have the money and discipline i think Kendo does the better job.
But if you want to have fun with a toy, this looks great.
Will definitely get one. Looks like a great way to settle disagreements =)
LARP’ists will have a field day with these! No more “20! 20! 20!”