Games Workshop - Warhammer 40,000 Kill Team Starter Set

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Thankfully, though, GW has generously provided Wargamer with free review copies of both Octarius and the Compendium – so I canshare my thoughts on how the thing turned out, who I think it’s for, and – ultimately – whether it’s any good. Since I’m a bluff old traditionalist, we’ll start at the beginning, with the big, brash,tangerine-coloured box of toys GW is using to fanfare its newest game.

Two planetary conflicts are roaring into full flame this week, as the Inquisition attempts to quell a Chaos Cult in Kill Team and the Sons of Horus strive to retake their home planet from the Imperial Fists in the first campaign book for the new edition of Warhammer: The Horus Heresy. You get a massive collection of 54 individual parts in this box, and it’s almost infinitely expandable – not least when the next set arrives three months later, bringing with it a whole new set of compatible space hulk scenery! The Rulebooks The Heavy Intercessor Gunner opened fire on the to flayed ones at the end of the corridor, killing one.

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There are plenty of extra options in this kit to add variety – extra heads, multiple build options for each body, and most arm options can be used on any operative. This is a complete set of ten unique sculpts – no duplicated sprue of five here! All but one of the poses are great – there’s one hunched over running pose that I think doesn’t quiiiiite work, but it’s not bad enough to actually matter. It also comes with two of each special weapon (other than the sniper rifle), each with a slightly different set of arms. This is where my only real complaint about the set lies – if you want to use them in Kill Team and aren’t just buying for your 40k army, it’s fairly easy to make an illegal squad. You must read the composition rules in the rulebook first rather than relying on the instruction manual, as you’re only allowed to take one of each weapon (to a maximum of four total, including the sniper rifle). The Blooded are an amazing evil twin to the Veteran Guardsmen team of the original Octarius box, and the Phobos team is sort of a blend between how teams were done in the Compendium book and how they’ve been done in the expansions (you can even take models in the Phobos team that aren’t in this expansion set!). Killzones (Terrain Sets) for Kill Team Killzone Upgrade: Gallowfall So, there are a handful of updated rules to Kill Team Arena and a few additional rules included in the Pariah Nexus set. Alongside a few changes to the new Tactics, there are a couple of biggies:

As I said, I’ll not rehash all the rules and mechanics, as you can browse them in our Kill Team: Octarius guide. Suffice it to say that, from the perspective of a long-term 40k player with tastes skewed more toward storytelling and atmosphere than competition, Kill Team 2.0 is very promising indeed. Then there’s the all familiar Shooting Phase. Whoever’s turn it is blasts away at their enemy – as long as there isn’t a wall or cover between them. At the end of round 5, with the Space Marines almost at full strength and the Necrons down to their final figure and final wound, it was all over for the Necrons. Victory Points were tallied up, and the game ended. Others, though, didn’t seem to come into play at all, and we were left wondering if and when they should be applied. Eventually, to keep the game moving, we just focused on trying to shoot/shank each other – which was great fun! By comparison, the original Starter Set – which is priced exactly the same – comes with the following:

The Captain moved up to grab the bottom objective, whilst on the other side of the map the Intercessors moving on the two objectives opened fire on the Chronomancer, inflicting him with a single wound. Meanwhile, the rules for the Blooded Kill Team reward aggressiveness — which is ironically not the case with all factions. Players will be able to field larger (compared to standard Imperial Guard) sets of units without making any concessions to durability. The faction also includes a new mechanic that rewards consistently killing the opposition with guaranteed hits and other goodies in later rounds. Once they get going, Blooded Kill Teams can be very hard to stop, making them more than a match for the Space Marines in this box. We don’t yet know if Fire Teams have any relevance in-game, or if they are merely for list-building purposes – but, given Kill Team 2.0’s apparent focus on force flexibility as a highly variable attribute between different factions, we wouldn’t be surprised to see multi-Fire Team factions able to deploy more widely, or in different ways, given their largernumbers.