Trying Out Gel Blaster Wargames

Back in high school I used to play wargames with my classmates all the time — you know, the kind with BB pellets. Times changed, and BB guns are basically done for in mainland China.

So recently a classmate dragged me out to play wargames again. Times changed again, and now it’s gel blasters.

There are two kinds of gel blasters right now: gravity-fed and magazine-fed.

Gravity-fed is the simple one — the BBs just sink down under their own weight. Like this Stedi 1911 pistol.

Two upsides: it’s cheap, and it holds a ton of ammo. Look at the photo — you can practically fill it from a little Nongfu Spring bottle. The downside is obvious too: feeding is unreliable, you get dry fires a lot, and there’s no real way to aim. Good for spraying wildly, bad for precise single shots.

The fix is to go magazine-fed. Magazine-fed gives you stable feeding, but the mag capacity is limited.

Like this Stedi tactical AK-47.

Magazine-fed beats gravity-fed on basically every front, though it costs a bit more. I’d personally recommend Stedi. A gel blaster is really just three parts — a gearbox, a battery, and a magazine. The barrel might need a hop-up to get more range, but that’s about it. The structure itself is dead simple, and to avoid being classified as a replica firearm, everything is plastic.

It also has a pre-feed system, plus semi-auto and full-auto modes. Semi-auto is very accurate — that’s what you pay for. Downside: sustained semi-auto can overheat the barrel and the motor.

Even though it’s plastic, the shell’s paint job can be made to look pretty metallic.

Lots of people online mod their gel blasters, but honestly there’s not much to mod. The structure is what it is, and no matter how you tinker with it, it stays roughly the same. Also, gel blasters use gel balls — normally tiny granules that you soak in water until they swell into fragile little water beads. These beads have basically zero lethality; they don’t even have destructive power. They shatter easily, which is one reason gel blasters are considered relatively safe for now.

Domestically there are only a handful of gel blaster brands — Bingfeng, Stedi, Yijiada and the like. I personally like the newer Stedi models: more power, stable gearbox. They also throw in a bunch of accessories, though most are useless — red dots, flashlights, scopes, that kind of thing.

If you’re going to play wargames with gel blasters, safety first. There are usually dedicated fields, and the game modes can borrow from CS — capture the flag, take the high ground, whatever. The place my classmate dragged me to was a run-down factory on the outskirts of Zhengzhou. The location and the combat style both felt good. Played all afternoon and had a blast.

I won’t post more pictures. What I really want to say is that this stuff is genuinely fun, and it actually feels like war. A lot of things you can’t experience in a video game come through clearly in live wargames — including how important fire suppression is.

And the most important thing: in a real firefight, you absolutely cannot stay calm and aim. Everyone is just spraying. Whoever has more ammo and more firepower is the boss.

There are plenty of wargame documentary videos on YouTube too, and they’re pretty entertaining. I hope I get to join more of these events and have more fun in the future. Way more interesting than bragging about CS on a computer.