Are you ready for an eye-popping, dart flying, awesome good time?
Then look no futher than our NERF inspired Foam Blaster Dessert Table and Birthday Party.
Non-Expanding Recreational Foam, or NERF for short. Our latest dessert table inspiration and the delight of most boys aged 2 to 35, well in this household anyway. I have to admit, NERF is a guilty pleasure of mine. Not everything NERF mind you, just the line of foam “blasters” that they toy company Hasbro has developed. It all started for me back in 2008. For some reason I decided to pickup at our local Wal-Mart, which happened to be the Kitty Hawk, NC location on the Outer Banks, my very first NERF blaster…the N-Strike Nite Finder EX-3.
The one that started it all…
To this day I don’t really know why I got it, maybe other than the fact that it looked “cool,” the very same reason that most men aged 2-35 tend to like the things they like. Yeah…oh and you could shoot things with it…AWESOME! *takes a deep breath…calming down* Our youngest, my son, had yet to be born so it couldn’t have been to use during our play time. No, all I really did was sit at my desk and shoot foam suction darts at the front door, with quite a bit of power I might add. Sounds pretty damn mundane, but I had a blast. It’s probably hard to understand the appeal, and even harder to articulate why I derive so much pleasure from a toy that is marketed to children ages 6 and up. Hey I do qualify for that “and up” segment!
I think Heather accurately sums up the mystery surrounding the appeal, when Desmond and I start brandishing the foam blasters and shooting each other, she just shakes her head and walks away. But not before she is usually tagged by several well placed shots to the buttocks… It’s like we, boys and man-children, are hardwired that way. I think I’ll just leave it at that. And now that I have passed on the legacy, and collection of several dozen NERF blasters, to my son it seemed only fitting to design a birthday table that would be worthy of that foam blaster heritage.
So without further ado, let me introduce to you the stars of the table.
From the venerated N-Strike dart blaster line we have…
From the newer Vortex line of disc blasters, we have…
As you may have already noticed the two product lines of blasters look remarkably different, and the differences do not end in the cosmetic department. They also fire vastly different ammunition, and the two different types are unfortunately not interchangeable. The N-Strike line uses a combination of streamline darts, whistler darts, suction darts, or “tagger” darts if you use the Dart Tag line of blasters. And if you are so inclined, you can actually manufacture your own “home brew” foam darts using materials you can find at your local hardware superstore. Just to clarify though, the box and manuals specifically state to NOT modify the blasters in any way, but that’s pretty much the same thing as outright asking an intelligent and curious person to go right ahead and try.
In September of 2011, Hasbro unveiled the new Vortex line of disc blasters, and pretty much turned the whole dart blaster scene upside down. Not only did these new blasters use a different kind of ammo, the futuristic sounding XLR Disc, but they also promised ranges double that of the current generation of dart blasters. This is due to the way the discs are propelled out of the blaster. Think of these discs as miniature Frisbees, and a mechanism inside the blaster is spinning the disc rapidly out of the barrel, soaring towards the intended target. And soar they do, quite far in fact. But if you have ever fired a Vortex blaster you may notice that the discs will suffer from something called the Magnus Effect (whoa science man!), which basically means they will keep spinning away in the very same direction that the mechanism used to initially spin the disc. The effect is pretty consistent though, so if you take that into account, you can become a crack-shot with this type of blaster. Who knew that something kids use to pelt themselves…and parents…and pets, with over and over, can actually teach you something about the universe we live in? Pretty awesome stuff…
For more information about our party please stay tuned for the full post with all the awesome details in a couple of days!