Tazer Tag Has Much Higher Stakes Than Boring Old Laser Tag

Laser tag is a lot of fun to play, and you don’t even have to go to one of those fancy arenas and play with middle schoolers to get in on the fun. At-home laser tag systems have been sold for decades now, and make it easy to play laser tag anywhere you can gather a group of friends. But the stakes are pretty low, and there is very little incentive to play defensively. That’s why YouTuber Michael Reeves designed and built Tazer Tag, which works exactly like it sounds like it does.

Reeves is known for building silly contraptions, and those usually aren’t very kind to his friends. Judging by the fact that he has nearly 3 million subscribers on YouTube, that cruelty is something you all like to laugh at. If so, then you’re going to love this project. It works just like normal laser tag, except your vest tazes you when you get shot by an opponent. If you think that would be painful, you are correct. The vests are outfitted with tazers that genuinely hurt the players, ensuring that they will try their best to avoid getting shot by the enemy.

To build the special tazer-equipped vests, Reeves started with a normal laser tag system like you can buy at any toy store. Normally the vests in the system simply vibrate when the player gets shot, but Reeves replaced the vibration motor with a small Arduino board. That board acts a bit like a relay, and triggers the tazer when the vest tries to activate the missing vibration motor. Reeves used a K40 laser cutter to make an enclosure to house the additional parts. In testing with Reeves’s new roommates from Offline TV, the tazer tag game seemed to work well — though you’d have a hard time convincing us to play.