Capture the Flag: A Failsafe Guide to Winning

1. Make sure your team gets the good half of the field. Don’t be fooled by lots of trees and hills. True, they provide many places to hide your flag, but they also provide many places for the enemy to hide, which makes it easy for them to sneak over without you realizing it. Choose the half that has more open space. It’s easier to spot, chase, and capture enemies when there isn’t a forest in the way.
2. Chose a team with a variety of people.
   1. Lazy people are good for sending over as decoys. They don’t really care whether they get captured or not and the other team will waste valuable players capturing and guarding them.
   2. Semi-lazy people are good for guarding your flag. They can just stand around, but still feel like they are contributing to the team effort.
   3. Risk-takers can help you determine where the enemy’s flag is. But be careful, they get captured a lot. Once the flag has been found, set them up in two teams. One team should be over on enemy territory as often as possible to keep them distracted. The other team should be given the task of freeing people who get captured.
   4. Patient people are the most important members of your team. These are the people who will actually be stealing the enemy’s flag. These people need to move from tree to tree towards the flag. This can take a long time, sometimes five or even ten minutes. On top of being patient it is a great help if the person is a good sprinter. Once the flag has been captured, it is key that the enemy is outrun.
3. When you are hiding your flag, chose an actual hiding place and a false hiding place. Set up guards at both hiding places. This will throw your enemy off. If you have enough people on your team, you can have more fake hiding places, but be sure to have at least three people guarding each one. Don’t put the most guards at the actual hiding place. Your enemy is expecting the actual flag to be the most heavily guarded. If you have an uneven number of guards, put more at one of the fake hiding spots.

You can also hide the flag in the pocket of one of your guards. Be careful with this one, though. Some people consider this move cheating.

4. Most important, have fun. I know that it’s hard to remember sometimes, but this is only a game