Kill Team: Bite-sized fun with your miniatures! — Wayland Games Blog

First of all: May your games be plenty and victorious.

Kill team, in itself, is a faster-paced version of your regular 40k games. The smaller armies, and fewer models, mean if you're like me and dread the downtime once your turn has ended, you'll love how fast this goes.

I organised a small introduction night for a few people at my local game club. After giving them a quick briefing on how leadership works in Kill Team, as well as the specialists and the limitations, they each made a list in roughly 10 to 15 minutes.

We had about 4 hours of game time so we aimed to test to see just how long introductions could last. To my surprise, I had completed 3 games in roughly 3 hours! This included; deployment, rule-checking, and post-game reflections. Each game lasted the full 5 turns (in order to give everyone a fair chance, I limited it to 5 turns). The last persons I played against had never played a miniature game before, yet. It suffices to say I was really pleased with this result.

I also experimented with terrain, as my club president wanted me to recreate a city battlefield.

Well, you be the judge if I succeeded or not:

Now, that is a lot of cover with plenty of changes in elevation and a load of Line Of Sight (LOS) blockage to boot!

In retrospect, I really crippled myself in this scenario seeing as I play Tau and like clear LOS in order to land the shots from as far away as I can. Nonetheless, I had fun, and so did the participants... I think they did at least!

I had 2 armies to go up against, Player one had an all bikes Space Marines list; 5 bikes with some nasty firepower to them.

By turn 3 I was able to reduce his force to 3 out of 5 bikes... but my force was broken.

Luckily the dice-gods listened to my plea and granted me a lot of successes on my leadership rolls so I could keep the fight going for as long as possible.

Only the bold shall be victorious... unless they're not (he wasn't victorious).

My first game ended in a clear loss for me. The two remaining bikes were free to roam the city as they outright obliterated my forces.

However, I had two more games to go!

Game 2 and 3 were against the same army; Khorne Deamonkin. My forces remained the same, my opponent had 4 Bloodcrushers at his disposal.

I spread my forces too thin allowing them to be flanked and just murdered through relentless charges.

At turn 5, my last remaining Pathfinder ran away in fear before he could kill the last Bloodcrusher. It was a tense game and it could have gone either way, even until the last moment.

I will tell you now if you didn't know already, that Force Broken (a special Kill Team rule) is extremely brutal.

In the third game, I went full turtle mode. I picked the densest building and occupied it with full force.

Thanks to some very successful overwatch firing, and covering fire, my Kill Team repelled the Daemon incursion.

So now that about a month has passed and I've been able to play several games of Kill Team, you might ask how it fairs in the 40K universe.

Kill Team is an incredible game, in its own right.

The special rules make it just unique enough to force you into thinking a different way to play your army.

It's definitely a great gateway into the full game of Warhammer 40k but I can see people choosing to stick with this and create a lot of kill teams with various armies.