In the summer of 2006, I decided I needed a good wargame to play with friends. Previously, I have not bothered nor been interested in wargames and the like until as late as the beginning of high school. I simply needed a fun wargame to get friends over to and play, and there were 5 apparent options: Paintball, Airsoft, Nerf, laser tag, and water warfare. Paintball and Airsoft were out of the question, as I couldn’t get people to constantly spend money renting guns and going to fields to play at. Laser tag was somewhat iffy as well. Spending money at arenas all the time would not do, and there didn’t seem to be good equipment you could buy at the time.
I ended up going with water warfare since one of my friends lived nearby and we could have a large battlefield; a base to base setup. There are hoses at each base and we still use this setup today. The “ammo” is easily available, the games are fairly large-scale compared to tight indoor laser tag games, and there are many varieties of water blasters and attacks such as buckets and water balloons. I wouldn’t get around the lack of a good scoring system until later on, but that didn’t matter too much to me.
I did get into Nerf later on, though was initially turned off due to having to pick up darts. Even now, buying darts gets expensive and the best option left for Nerf is to move onto modded/homemade blasters and darts. However, since I lack the time and resources to do so, I stick to indoor, casual Nerf wars which happen when the season does not permit water warfare.
Eventually, I took a web design class in high school and decided to put that knowledge to use. HBWW was born.
![[Image: the old HBWW]](http://img7.imageshack.us/i/oldhbww.png/)
From there on, updates have simply been casual additions and revisions of info, as well as new graphics and logos going around. However, I’ve had more ambitious plans for the 2010-2011 period which have taken a while to complete due to lack of time and interest.
Much of the history of our local water warfare can be found under the Mobilize section. 2006 was our first year and started off fairly casually. I actually only got to host one actual water war war while the rest were simply duels and skirmishes with friends. After getting soaked at a few of those battles, partly due to bad weaponry, I got revenge at a summer camp where we went canoeing; I loaded up the Flash Flood and went on a memorable soaking spree out on the lake.
2007 saw the continuation of CTF soakfests. The first majorly failed war (typically occuring when masses of people no longer wish to participate and just screw around) was also here. Later on the season, I organize our first 1 hit kill elimination games which became a staple of the 2008 season.
2008 introduced it’s own firsts. I organized a small fireteam together and we met up with another team from iSoaker, and we proceeded to some 1 hit kill games with a variety of blasters. We got thoroughly owned by the other team’s superior waterpower and the fact that we were unfamiliar with the playground environment. After that was a standard local war before our two teams met up again later on which turned into a disaster with the public.
Things winded down fast for 2009. Only two wars took place and both were back at the same old place: around my house. The first was the season opener, which lacked attendance but turned out to be great fun. Lots of new games were tested and it provided much needed ground to experiment with different ways of water warring. The war after turned into another disaster due to similar problems with the failed war during 2007. After that the season closed down since I couldn’t organize anymore events.
Little has changed in 2010. I was still only able to organize two wars, but both were successful and fun. I also finally won my first CTF game, and tested a new spawning system that worked out fairly well. The administrator of Super Soaker Central tried to organize a large meeting for the water warring community. Unfortunately, he was unable to do so and had to cancel, and HBWW would not have been able to participate anyhow.
2011 saw some rather remarkable changes to HBWW despite the less effort I put into things. There were two events and three wars, where two wars took place over the course of two days. I got a video together of it which needs to be edited together.
2012 is stagnating. Hopefully WordPress can help save HBWW’s online presence lol.
