Warhammer 40,000 is a sci-fi space fantasy that is a galaxy wide and ten thousand years long. It’s big – very big – with many models, books, games and the like, and as such can be a little intimidating for anyone looking to get into it. Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team attempts to fix thatby being a small-scale skirmish within this vast world.
In Kill Team, you have a tiny band of models and you pit them against a similarly elite team. Rather than spending an entire day setting up and a suitcase worth of models, you have a fairly short set-up and a quick game. This is not a new thing; many miniature games are small-scale, but what Kill Team does is keep the epic scale and storytelling of the source material intact.
It does this with smart rules and even smarter components. In addition to the 20 models for the game (10 for each side), there’s an entire ancient Imperial chapel kit to build. This vast and sprawling ruin is the cover and terrain that the game needs, and coupled with the play mat, you get a lovely looking game board that you can plonk down and play with. Other similar games just give you some walls and the odd bunch of barrels for your troops to hide behind, but this is 40K. It needs to pull you straight into the “Gothic Ruins in Space” vibe as quickly as it can.
The compact board keeps this from being yet another sprawling Warhammer game. The result is a tight game. We have three modes; Open, Narrative, and Matched. Open play is the free-for-all format, where you just have fun with it and don’t worry too much about balance. These are missions that keep the game fun and fair, but it’s mostly designed for one-off matches to while away a lunch break. Matched play is the points balanced system for tournament and competitive games, while Narrative play combines the two, linking everything together into a campaign. Your troops level up and gain abilities. It’s designed for multiple games with the same units.
Rules wise, this a Games Workshop game. Everything has been refined to make it quick to play. We get normal six sided dice, reference cards in great abundance, lots of setting material and paint guides, and a handy reference for putting the models together. The pieces slot together reasonably well, requiring normal skill and patience. The two forces are Adeptus Mechanicus and Genestealer Cults; two of the less well-served factions in the game. They look great and play brilliantly; the vicious and cunning of the cultists works well against the walking guns that are the Mechanicus. The game has rules for 16 playable factions, which means that if you’ve got some 40K models somewhere in the house, then you can play.
This is not Shadespire for 40K; it’s instead a simple yet deep and tactical game designed to draw old gamers back into the fold and introduce newbies to the 41st Millennium. Worth a look.
WARHAMMER 40,000: KILL TEAM / PUBLISHER: GAMES WORKSHOP / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
