In a stretch of New Hampshire spring when most high school seniors are counting down to graduation, the dominant social ritual at Concord High School and Hopkinton High School has not been prom or yearbook signings. It has been Assassins, a month-long game in which students stalk each other with water guns, dodge masked classmates ducking out of vans, and post triumphant photos to private Instagram accounts after a successful “kill.” The tradition has become so deeply embedded in senior-year culture across the Granite State that it now sits alongside cap-and-gown rehearsals and senior trips on the calendar of major rites of passage. But the same scope and visibility that make Assassins exciting have also produced a string of police calls this year, and in Hopkinton the student organizers ultimately chose to shut their game down early.

According to a story by NHPR and the Concord Monitor’s Granite State News Collaborative, the games at Concord High and Hopkinton High both kicked off this spring with elaborate rule sets, entry fees, and 50 or more participating teams. Concord’s game proceeds in week-long rounds, with teams that fail to assassinate their assigned target by Friday eliminated from the bracket. Concord started with 50 teams. Thirty survived the first week. The second week is in motion now. Hopkinton’s game, by contrast, ended after just a few days, after what organizers and parents described as multiple safety incidents.

The Mechanics Of A Modern Game

Assassins is not a New Hampshire invention. Versions of it have circulated on college campuses and in summer-camp culture for decades. What is new is the way the current generation of seniors has industrialized it. The structure varies from school to school but the core is consistent: every participant is randomly assigned a target, and the goal is to “eliminate” that target with a squirt of water from a water gun. Hits made inside school buildings during the school day are off limits. So are hits made during sports practices, official school events, and most extracurricular activities. Participants pay an entry fee, sometimes pooled into hundreds of dollars, and the surviving player or team at the end of the bracket takes the prize money, sometimes with a smaller secondary cut for the player or team with the highest kill count.

The rules also include defensive accommodations. Players who wear swim goggles in public spaces, no matter how absurd the context, are typically considered immune. That is why a senior wandering a grocery store aisle in foam-padded goggles is not actually preparing to swim. They are protecting themselves from being shot by a classmate hiding two aisles over. The same goes for life jackets and inflatable arm floaties in some local rulesets, all of which produce a steady supply of conversations between parents who wonder why a 17-year-old is dressed for a pool party in May.

Concord’s game prohibits students from targeting each other at their place of work, but the rule comes with a notable caveat: opponents may, the rules read, “wait for them to arrive or get out.” That single line captures the spirit of the game. Players cannot kick down the workplace door, but they can sit in their cars in a parking lot until a target’s shift ends and the chase resumes.

Why The Cops Keep Getting Called

The trouble is that the rest of the community has not signed the rulebook. To a neighbor, a group of high schoolers in dark clothes camped on a residential street is not a competitive game. It is suspicious behavior. Hopkinton Police Chief Thomas Hennessey told NHPR that his department received a report from a homeowner who saw individuals hiding in the woods near his home and worried they might be stealing packages. They were not. They were Assassins players waiting for their target. Hennessey, in an interview with NHPR’s reporting partner, said the homeowner happened to be a military veteran, and he flagged the situation as the kind of misunderstanding that could have ended badly.

“The homeowner is ex-military, and if he didn’t have any inclination, and there was two individuals prowling around his home, he has cause for concern, and who knows what he would do,” Hennessey said. The chief recounted a separate call last year for “a bunch of masked people in a van in downtown Contoocook,” which turned out to be a different Assassins squad.

Concord’s police department, by contrast, has not received any Assassins-related calls this year, according to Lt. Thomas Yerkes. That track record reflects in part the Concord game’s stricter messaging to participants. Concord’s organizers warn players in writing to “please use good judgement. Read the room, be smart.” Hopkinton’s rules went further, mandating in bold letters that participants’ water guns “cannot resemble real guns.” That language exists for exactly the reasons Hennessey described. A water pistol that looks like a Glock is not a water pistol the public will recognize from across a street.

How Hopkinton’s Game Ended

Hopkinton’s organizers shut the game down prematurely after the second police call, citing what they described as “multiple incidents.” Loren Clement, a parent of a Hopkinton senior, told NHPR that the organizers received “pressure from above,” meaning from the broader adult community. “There was a baseline of rules, and what escalated the shutdown of this was one of the students was not following the rules that had been set forth,” Clement said. “When you break the rules, things happen.” Clement’s daughter, before the shutdown, had asked the family to keep an eye out for classmates lurking outside the house, Clement said. The decision to end the game early was made by the students themselves, not by school administrators or police, though the police calls clearly accelerated it.

The pattern raises a question that has come up in other towns where Assassins-style games have grown popular. At what point does a game played in public spaces become a public-safety problem? In Hopkinton’s case, the answer ended up being the moment a homeowner felt threatened enough to call dispatch. The town’s organizers decided that line was firm, and they pulled the plug rather than wait for the next incident.

A New Hampshire Snapshot

The story sits at an interesting intersection of New Hampshire culture. The state retains a strong attachment to outdoor, low-tech, in-person fun, and it has a libertarian streak that tends to value teenagers’ freedom to organize their own social rituals. Assassins fits squarely in that tradition. It is, at its core, a generation of students choosing to spend their last weeks of high school running around outside instead of staring at phones, a question that resonates beyond Assassins and into broader conversations about civic learning programs working to draw teenagers back into the public square. NHPR’s reporting notes that the game gives seniors “a rare burst of in-person fun and bonding before high school ends,” and that framing rings true to anyone who has watched the social geography of high school shift toward screens over the last decade.

At the same time, the same New Hampshire that values that freedom also takes property and personal safety seriously. The state’s gun culture, while broadly responsible, means that a person who sees a stranger in a tactical mask creeping around their yard may well have firearms in the house and a reasonable expectation of being able to use them. Hennessey’s worry, that a misunderstanding could have ended in tragedy, is not theoretical. It is the specific reason rules like Hopkinton’s “no realistic water guns” mandate exist. The line between a memorable senior tradition and an avoidable disaster is, in some cases, literally the color of plastic.

What Schools Can Do, And What They Can’t

Concord High School and Hopkinton High School both treat the game as a student-organized activity, not a school-sponsored one. That distance is intentional. If schools formally adopted the game, they would inherit liability for any incidents that happened during play, including on private property and after school hours. By keeping Assassins outside the official school structure, administrators preserve their ability to enforce rules about phones, weapons, and conduct on campus while letting the game live in its own ecosystem off campus.

The student organizers, for their part, have begun behaving like risk managers. They write rules. They distribute them in advance. They communicate with parents. They include language about workplace etiquette, public-property etiquette, and the appearance of weapons. The cancellation of Hopkinton’s game shows that they are also willing to call the season early when those rules are not enough. As other school-policy questions like the GOP push to expand school choice continue to dominate State House debate, Assassins is a reminder that not every consequential school story this spring runs through Concord’s Legislative Office Building. Some of them run through suburban driveways at dusk, with a goggled senior counting the seconds until their target’s shift ends.

The Bigger Picture

For the seniors involved, the game has already done its job. It has produced inside jokes, brought together friend groups that did not previously overlap, and created the kind of high-stakes, low-consequence drama that gets retold at five-year reunions. For the parents and police officers who fielded the early-season calls, it has also produced a useful reminder that any tradition involving plastic firearms in public needs to be paired with constant, explicit messaging about how it looks to people who are not in on the joke.

Concord’s game continues for now. The next round closes at the end of this week, and the field will shrink again. Whether the rest of the season passes without further police involvement depends on how seriously the remaining 30 teams take the same lesson Hopkinton learned the hard way. Read the room. Be smart. Don’t make the cops the punchline of someone’s senior year.

What is the Assassins game?

Assassins is a senior-year tradition at many New Hampshire high schools, including Concord High and Hopkinton High, in which students are randomly assigned targets and try to "eliminate" them with water guns. Hits are off limits inside school buildings and during school events, and most rule sets include creative immunity rules like wearing swim goggles.

Is the game sponsored by the school?

No. Both Concord High School and Hopkinton High School treat Assassins as a student-organized activity that takes place outside school grounds and outside school hours. Schools deliberately keep their distance to avoid liability for off-campus incidents.

Why was Hopkinton's game shut down?

Hopkinton's student organizers ended the game early in May after multiple incidents, including a police call from a homeowner who saw participants hiding in the woods near his house. Parent Loren Clement told NHPR that the organizers received outside pressure and that one student had been breaking the established rules.

What rules do organizers put in place to prevent misunderstandings?

Common rules include banning water guns that look like real firearms, prohibiting hits inside school buildings, prohibiting hits at workplaces during a target's shift, and requiring permission before entering another player's home. Both Concord and Hopkinton stress that participants should "use good judgement" and consider how the activity looks to outsiders.

How does a team win?

The exact structure varies, but in Concord's version teams pay an entry fee, the game proceeds in week-long rounds, and teams that fail to assassinate their assigned targets by the end of the week are eliminated. The last team standing wins the pooled prize money, sometimes with a separate cut for the team with the highest kill count.

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