If you have played Crusade or Path to Glory then you know the drill here (And Spec Ops actually kinda works as a blend of the two) you start with a kill team and over the course of the campaign you will gain experience, earn special equipment and goals, expand your available pool of operatives and even expand your base of operations from a hasty built forward post to a bustling command centre. Curabitur blandit, erat at ultricies pretium, libero dui sollicitudin enim, et sodales nisl augue nec mauris. Matched Play is designed for tournament play, and here we see each player being able to bring a list of 20 operatives, but then select the actual members of the kill team once they know the mission, terrain and deployment zones – this is great as represents how a kill team would be tailored for the mission at hand then sent to do the job, rather than being a random collection of guys not suited to that specific mission.

My favorites among these are Vid-Capture Relay, which lets a Guardsman Comms Operative perform its Signal action to boost another operative’s APL from anywhere on the table, and Fungal Brew, which removes a Kommando’s Battle Scars and prevents them from being injured or killed during and after the battle. Kommandos can do similar, and my favorite of these is Thievin’ Git, which gives your operative a free piece of Equipment before the battle from your stash. Open Play as you would imagine is more open, with the rules presenting more of a frame work with the players themselves deciding on any special rules, objectives and storyline along with a basic example mission. The Kriegers aren’t going to have an easy time of it though – the Orks’ Kommandos are honestly terrifying, thanks to their Throat Slittas rule. In that sense, it’s easy to picture this as a model for future expansions, where we’re given new, more bespoke kill teams as their own standalone factions rather than adding to the options available to other factions.Your options here are simple, but useful: Either add 1” to your team’s Movement characteristics, or re-roll results of 1s in either shooting attacks, melee attacks, or defense rolls. If an operative performs this action, until the end of the Turning Point, they cannot perform any other actions. Finally we come to Spec Ops, which are like mini narrative arcs for your Kill Team to work through as you run them in a campaign. At the end of the battle, if the Defender’s Commander is Injured, the Attacker scores 6VP (if the Defender’s Commander is Incapacitated, the Attacker scores 9VPs instead. In addition, an operative cannot perform this action in the same activation in which it performed the Fall Back or Charge action.

With time being a precious resource, there’s loads of games to play and not nearly enough time – but with only a handful of models on each side and a small gaming footprint I can see Kill Team being a regular addition to our gaming rotation. Next up in the box we have something that people have been wanting for a very long time – plastic Death Korps of Krieg! This one has a very “Orky” design, but I imagine just like with the previous editions of the game that we will see Kill Zone boxes with themed designs and terrain. These options provide some cool and flavorful options that also give you access to some new tactics that wouldn’t be available to you otherwise. Adding an extra level of strategy to this is the fact that when you active an operative you can set them to “Engage” or “Conceal”- Engage simply allows them to make more actions, this is essentially the standard state of your units.

Once an operative has lost half their wounds they also reduce their movement, BS and WS to represent them being on their last legs! That said, once past the annoyances, they go together well and look great as I hope my quick snaps illustrate faithfully.