Armageddon 2026: We Are the Shadow Syndicate

1 day ago
2 min read

The Shadow Syndicate team arrived in Syracuse bright and early on Thursday morning, ready to take on Armageddon 2026!

I had a good feeling about joining this team

and the vibe stayed right every step of the way during this tournament, played under the captaining of NinjaGangsta (Terrence) and alongside teammates MamaBear, Havoc, Showtime, Grumpy, Papa Smurf, Shadowdragon and Masterboy.

Day 1 was a lot of tag, all imported, which always brings with it some challenges. I want to acknowledge that everyone worked incredibly hard to make things run as smoothly as possible with Storm and Q-Zar being played simultaneously in half-arena spaces on each side of the field.

The day started with a briefing on Q-Zar, which featured some player-developed ingenuity with these wireless energizers. You’ll notice the ‘Geddon logo on the 3D printed boxes.

Everyone listened to RNT as he explained how to energize (you must see the blue lights!) and demonstrated what to do.

And Logan gave the Storm briefing.

We were ready to give it our all! With Grumpy and Papa Smurf being our Storm experts, we looked up to them both (literally…these guys are redwood tall!) and we went in flashlighting the arena up!

Each Storm game was alternated with a Q-Zar game, which I honestly enjoy a lot more these days than I used to.

With simultaneous games going on and having to play two systems, we were nearly always playing or reffing. While we were refs, we got a bird’s eye view of the action.

Storm and Q-Zar garnered marginal results, with a handful of wins, but also a couple of games that I thought could have easily gone our way, but for one reason or another broke differently. Regardless, we had a great time and knew we had to pace ourselves, with stronger systems ahead.

With a short break in between systems, we had a chance to be social and visit with friends from other teams as well.

It’s always Photonic-iconic when I get a chance to play a few games with Bhodi Li vs Tivia!

Laser tag is always best with great friends!

But we also get serious and took some time to strategize as a team.

Our third system of the day was Blast.

We split the wins in this system, taking half the games we played, but it was not without incident. Remember when I sprained my ankle a couple of weeks ago? Well, during a tete a tete go-around circling with Dallas during a Blast game I took a hard fall on that ankle. Don’t worry, we iced it and I did not let it keep me down.

Now, Grumpy had made a VERY clever wooden Armageddon Bingo game with tiles to flip when ‘Geddon inevitabilities happened during the tournament.

Thanks to that incident, we flipped another tile!

It’s all good, I survived and played on!

That was a very long day, starting at 4:30 am and playing late into the evening, but it was also a great start to Armageddon 2026 with the Shadow Syndicate!