After a one-year hiatus due to the pandemic, the annual senior game of ‘Assassins’ has made a come back. The game combines tag, hide and seek and waterguns on an extreme level. After each student participating paid 10 dollars to play, the game was on.
The rules are simple: each senior is assigned a classmate to ‘tag’ out over the course of the week — death by water. Not only does each student have someone to kill, but they also have someone going after them. School and school events are protected. The same goes for work and clubs sports, but parking lots are fair game. The rules are fairly lenient, except for strict ones that outlaw breaking into another’s house or harming anyone. Once someone water snipes their target, they adopt that person’s target.
The game goes on for four weeks, and everyone gets a new target each round. The person, or people, left at the end of the game receives a pool of money created from the players’ original entry fee.
In March when the game was brought up in the senior GroupMe chat, senior Sullivan Goettsch decided he would adopt the role of game maker. After hours of organizing and rearranging names, he assigned each participant with a target.
“A couple of people asked me, ‘Are you going to assign people to their friends the first round, or will it be completely random?’” Goettsch said. “And I was like, ‘Being with your friends actually sounds pretty fun.’ So that’s what I did.”
As the game of Assassins carries on, the stories continue to get more entertaining, and the numbers continue to decline. Here are a few of the stories.
MAISIE, KENNEDY AND REESE
Senior Kennedy Kaufman was delighted when she read who her target was: senior Reese Althouse, one of her best friends. ‘This will be easy,’ she thought.
Only two days into the game, Kaufman had a plan formed: she’d strike when Althouse, senior Maisie Sheets and her went on their daily lunch outing. Kaufman knew that the drive to her car in the junior lot would be the perfect way to lure Althouse off campus.
“It was my plan the whole week to forget my lunch in my bag, in my car in the junior lot,” Kaufman said. “Then I would have one of them drive me [from the senior lot] to get it and get her then.”
After Althouse’s car had left the senior lot, Kaufman used the few short seconds she had to grab her water gun, aim and fire.
But when she felt cold water hitting her, she knew someone had beat her to pulling the trigger. Kaufman had unknowingly trapped herself in a car with her own Assassin: Sheets.
After seeing the gun in Kaufman’s hand, Sheets realized that her new target would be Althouse, who was already sitting within inches of her. She knew just how lucky she had gotten.
“So when she got me, she got both of us in one, back to back,” Althouse said. “I can remember the look on Maisie’s face when she realized she was getting a double kill.”
SAMMY AND SOPHIA
With senior Sammy Jones on spring break until Wednesday April 14, senior Sophia Reicherter, his assassin, had extra time to prepare. But since she had three less days to get her ‘kill,’ timing was critical.
With help from Jones’ friends, Reicherter began researching. After learning that her target’s flight was coming from Dallas, she checked every flight landing in Kansas City from the Dallas Love Field airport. The 4:00 p.m. flight it was.
Reicherter made the drive to Kansas City International Airport on Wednesday night, Gatorade bottle in hand, ready to execute her plan.
“I went in the bathroom at the airport,” Reicherter said. “Once I saw them, and once I saw that he was not looking at me, I just started sprinting.”
Jones’ Assassins participation was bittersweet and short-lived.
“I really thought I was gonna win,” Jones said. “And you know, why wouldn’t I play if I knew I was gonna win? I just got caught off guard without having any defense at the airport.”
ABBY AND CARSON
When assigned the target of senior Abby Carter, senior Carson Holmes, nicknamed “Cargo,” knew he would spend hours trying to get her out, since her siblings who have previously participated in the game have gone full throttle. But he pushed the the fear of failing out of his mind.
Carter’s determination to stay hidden was not hindered by Holmes’ gusto. Once she learned Holmes had her through friends, she knew how to hide.
“I parked in my neighbor’s driveway that’s directly behind our backyard,” Carter said. “So I would hop the fence every day, cause I knew Cargo would be at my house. I told everyone that I was staying at my brother’s house for the week. Just [so] no one would know.”
During the week, Holmes was alerted that Carter was at her house after ‘killing’ her own target. Holmes used Carter’s street being a culdesac to his advantage, blocking the exit with his own car. But after a few minutes of attempting to lure Carter out of her car, Holmes’ opportunity was cut short.
“Unfortunately there was a car trying to get through, so I had to move my car,” Holmes said. “Then she got out and that sort of lost it. That was a perfect chance that I lost.”
Saturday night was the final chance for Holmes to get Carter out, and he used it to its full extent. As he had gotten back in town late at night after being in St. Louis for a lacrosse game all day, he anticipated that Carter had let her guard down — who was expecting him to be back on Sunday. Once learning that she was at one of their friend’s houses, he snuck in for the attack.
“I was at a friend’s house, and then I felt that my back was wet,” Carter said. “I see Cargo there. I was like, ‘Oh my God, thanks Cargo.’ I was never expecting to see him there.”