About Us

Founded in Rotorua in 2017, the New Zealand Lightsaber Guild started as a fortnightly meet-up of 6 local Star Wars fans who had a common vision of introducing the sport of competitive lightsaber combat to New Zealand. It was a growing sport overseas and one that we felt had a place with NZ Star Wars fans & martial arts practitioners. The sport saw significant validation when the French Fencing Federation adopted it as an official discipline in February 2019.

By early 2020 we’d managed to grow the New Zealand community to 600 members, with local groups established across the length of the country. July 2020 was originally set as the date for our first national tournament, which was unfortunately postponed due to Covid-19. Not ones to ‘twiddle our thumbs’, we instead concentrated on growing the core community.

October 2021, saw an opportunity to run our first national tournament in Palmerston North. Scaled down a little as our Auckland and Waikato competitors were unable to attend due to last minute regional covid lockdowns, the event ran for 7 hours in total with 5 hours of competition. Despite the smaller attendance, it was a great success and we had our first national champion!

We ran our second event in Rotorua in June 2022 which had a great attendance and out third event in November 2022 in Wellington. Our fourth National Tournament is planned for late May 2023 in Hamilton which will be even bigger and better!

At the time of writing (Jan 2023), we have a national community of just over 1400 members and 7 established clubs across the country. Over their course, some of the regional clubs have also grown to include choreography, games & some other miscellaneous saber shenanigans.