All Linked Up!

This past weekend at Great Escape Games in Sacramento, CA was the 4th Twin-Linked Tournament of the year.  24 teams showed up for the event, matching the average for the year.  In all, it was a great tournament with tough competition.  However, in the end, yours truely partnered up with my buddy "Big" Ray Barrera took the tournament. 

For those of you who follow the blog and have read the previous posts, you would know that this makes 3 Twin-Linked Tournament victories in a row for me.  I won the first 2 with Matt Bess and this last one with Ray.  We earned 147/150 possible points!  The only points we failed to get was against our Round 2 opponents and killing their augmented Tau Command Suit.

This were the lists we brought to the tournament:

Farseer, Shard of Anaris, Bike- 155
Warlock w/ Jetbike- 50

x9 jetbikes, x3 Cannons- 183
x5 DAs, Serpent w/ Bright Lance- 185
x5 DAs, Serpent w/ Bright Lance- 185

Wraithknight- 240

The Baron- 105

x5 Warriors, Venom- 110
x5 Warriors, Blaster, Venom- 125
x5 Warriors, Blaster, Venom- 125

x5 Beast Masters, Fiend, x5 Khymera, x6 Flock- 250

Ravager w/ Nightshields- 115

Vengeance Battery w/ Battle Cannon- 85
Vengeance Battery w/ Battle Cannon- 85

I thin kthey are pretty solid lists and we were both using untis we had never played with before.  Ray hadn't used a Warlock yet nor the Wraithknight.  I wanted to experiment with the Battle Cannon Batteries.

So onto our games.  Our first two opponents played Dark Angels and Tau.  The Dark Angels included Belial with a healthy 10 Termies, a Vindi, and a Drop Pod of Tactical Marines.  The Tau player had a Command Suit, some Crisis Suits, a couple squads of Fire Warriors, a squad of Sniper Kroot, and a Riptide.  This game was essentially over Turn 3.  We had downed most of their units without takign much casualties.  There was 6 objectives in the mission, of which we captured 5.  The twist on the mission was that for each objective you captured, in mission 2 and 3, you could roll on a chart and "augment" a unit of your choice. 

Our second game was against Tau and Dark Angels as well.  This time Sammael and bikes made their appearance.  3 healthy squads of bikes with a squad of Black Knights.  A Tau Commander with 3 Crisis Suits, a Devilfish Fire Warrior unit, 2 Missile-Sides, and a large Sniper Kroot Squad all made another appearance.  (Something seems fishy!)  We chose to augment our Warlord, the Farseer and get received the augment "The Warlord and his unit have the 'Ignore cover USR."  This was excellent.  Our Farseer was riding around with 10 other bikes, including a Warlock.  We also augmented the Jetbikes.  The Jetbikes became Toughness 5 for their Augment!  Nice!  And then we augmented our Ravager and it received "Move Through Cover USR,"  which isn't terrible, but not that good considering the other augments.

Our game went down to the wire.  We were able to deny objectives with the bikes and kill two augmented units to capture the victory.  We were not able to kill their buffed up Command Suit for Warlord so we only got a 17/20. 

Our third game was against my old partner, Matt Bess and his partner.  Go figure we both would be playing for the Championship!  I guess it just proves that we're both xcellent players no matter who we're teamed with!  Matt brought his Drop Pod Wolves and his partner brough Eldar with soem D-Scythe Wraithguard, a coupel Serpents, some Jetbikes, a small squad of Spiders, and a Fire Prism.  Augements carried over for this game which helped us out a lot! Unfortunately, they also very much helped the other team as well!  Matt had 2+ Armor Save Grey Hunters which we could not dislodge!  In the end, we pulled it out with a perfect 20 after holding our home base objective and denying theirs!   Hard fought game with a lot of twists and turns.  Awesome ending to another awesome tournament!

The TO of the Twin-Linked Tournament, and fellow Sac City Punisher, Omegaprime is giving away an end of the year award for the team that has the 3 highest scores for the year.  This is a dilemma for me.  Do I go with my original partner, Big Ray and build onto the victory we just had and finalize our list for the GT at the end of the year; or do I go with Matt who has claimed 2 victories with me this year and if we essentially play in a third tournament we are almost guaranteed the Overall award at the end of the year.  I think I should go with Big Ray as we are playing in the end of the year GT and could use another tournament under our belt to finalize things for the tournament.

You can see all of the results at www.greatescapegames.com  Click the link for Forums and then click on the Twin-Linked page.

Also check out the Great Escape Games website for the Twin-Linked GT on December 7th and 8th.  2 Day, 6 game event following all of the Twin-Linked Tournament rules! check it out and sign up!  We have 15 teams signed up now!  Grab a partner and play in the last tournament in 2013!  I promise you will not be disappointed!