What Does “boffer” Mean?

A boffer is a padded mock weapon built so that LARP participants can strike each other in combat without injury.

Part of speech

noun, often used as a modifier

Category

LARP terminology

Meaning in context

Underneath the foam there is something rigid holding the shape: a length of plastic pipe, or fiberglass, carbon fiber, bamboo, aluminum. Around that goes padding, usually open-cell or closed-cell foam, pipe insulation or a cut-down pool noodle, and over the lot goes a skin of duct tape, gaffer tape, cloth, opaque tights, latex or a rubber coating. Anything meant for stabbing carries a separate tip of compressible foam, which European groups tend to discourage rather than encourage. So the word describes a method as much as an object, which is why two boffers built to different rulebooks can look nothing alike.

It is also the one piece of kit that has to survive being inspected. A phys rep only has to convince the eye. A weapon gets picked up by somebody with authority before play starts, flexed, and either passed or sent back to the car, and the standard it is judged against belongs to that event rather than to the hobby at large. Games built on this pair the weapon with the vocabulary for stopping a fight, which is why the briefing covers the safety calls before it covers the plot.

Used in front of another noun it names a kind of game rather than a thing. A boffer LARP settles a fight by people actually swinging at each other and landing hits, which puts it at the opposite end of the hobby from games resolved by dice at a table and from the rulesets that ban weapon props outright, even ones that merely resemble the real thing. One US game sells itself on the phrase “a lightest-touch boffer LARP”, which tells you the label leaves plenty of room: force, contact and hit location are all set locally. Some people reserve boffer for the taped, homemade end of the scale and use other words for a sculpted latex weapon bought in a shop, while reference works treat it as simply another name for a foam weapon. There is no agreed line, and claiming one would be inventing it.

Where it comes from

Where the word came from is not recorded anywhere. The reference works that define boffer define it and stop: no coiner, no first printing, no derivation offered. Guesses exist, and none of them has a source behind it.

The activity is dated far better than the word for it. One of the long-running American battle-game clubs was founded in 1977, and its early weapons were assembled out of household junk: broom handles and cushion foam. Another club started up in El Paso in 1983, advertising its first gathering in the local paper, and its weapons are described as giving up realism in exchange for safety. Somewhere across those decades a padded stick acquired a name, and nobody wrote down the day it did.

Examples

• My first boffer was a bit of pipe, two layers of foam and most of a roll of tape, and it failed the weapons check before I reached the field.
• It is a boffer game, so winning the duel means landing the hit yourself, not describing how you would have landed it.
• He swings that boffer like a cricket bat and the marshals have pulled him aside twice about it.

More from the dictionary

This entry is part of the LARP dictionary, which covers the vocabulary of live-action role-play and the internet slang that grew up around it. The two pillar pages are what LARP is and what larpmaxxing means.