What is Kill Team?

If you are getting your feet wet into miniature gaming for the first time, or you only have an hour or so to get a game in and want to play something smaller and different. Kill Team is going to be your best bet for either of those itches. This system is designed to be a smaller and quicker version of Warhammer 40,000, once you get the hang of this you will have no problem picking up the actual game, aside from buying all the things.

Getting the Band Back Together!

In kill team you only need a handful of models to get you started, this is why I recommend getting into Kill Team first before you tackle the world of 40k. For the most part all the basic troop boxes that you see your friendly local gaming store will be able to be played and feel like they have some impact in the game.  You just need to pick up the Kill Team book and flip through the different armies and choose whichever ones you like the most, always use the rule of cool when starting out. Remember these are also models so you will need to at the very least get them together, and then hopefully painted.

There are quite a few different armies to pick from so take your time and look over all the entire range, and don't worry about what other people are playing, you do you boo. I will write up a little page on each army as I go throughout all the different armies and their play styles. The that you can play as are as following, Adeptus Astartes, Deathwatch, Grey Knights, Astra Militarum, Adeptus Mechanicus, Heretic Astartes, Death Guard, Thousand Sons, Asuryani, Drukhari, Harlequins, Necrons, Orks, Tau Empire, Tyranids, and lastly Genestealer Cults.

Once you pick up a faction and get some models put together then you can start thinking about what kind of squad you are going to assemble. We need to write up all the different possibilities of units, load outs, and specializations we can muster onto our Command Roster.  The command roster is essentually your "pool" of units that you can take to play with, this list can contain up to 20 models, they must share the same faction keyword.

Everyone Is Special

In every list you have to have a leader, this unit will be the one who takes command over the squad, really they are just going to generate you a command point each and every turn. In my opinion this unit should be something cheap and no real weapons, just stick him behind terrain by an objective and let him generate that command point.

You can have up to three different Specialists, Combat, Comms, Demolitions, Heavy, Medic, Scout, Sniper, Veteran, and Zealot. Each of these will add some spice the unit who becomes a specialist, and they will give you access to new tactics. We will go into more depth on the individual tactics in future articles, for now I will give you an example I use in my Drukhari (Dark Eldar) Kill Team. I like to pair my Shardnet and Impailer Wych with Zealot to give her +1 Strength and +1 Attack, before any Drug or Power from Pain modifiers she is throwing out 3 Str 4 attacks that do 2 Damage, with an option to spend a Command Point to possibly add more attacks on hits of 6+! (On turn three this becomes on a 5+ dice roll, with Power from Pain's add 1 to hit roll modifier). Also pairing my Comms Kabalite Warrior with my Sniper Kabalite Gunner for a 2+ to hit re-rolling ones, that means I am going to get either my Splinter Cannon or Dark Lance hitting those high priority targets reliably.

Wheels in the Game Keep Turning

When you finally get your Kill Team arranged and painted up ready for some skirmishes. Break out your rule book that you should have read over a couple of times to get the hang of the system. Here you will notice it's very similar to Warhammer 40,000. There are a few minor tweaks such as roll for initiative  to see who starts each turn, going back and forth between shooting and combat, lastly is rolls of 6s always count in the same manor 1s always fail.  Your first few matches will take around an hour and a half, between learning rules and your Kill Team. Once you get the hang of the game you should spend less than an hour playing the game, making this a great way to play a quick game compared to 40k. 

I have only played a handful of games so far, but I would recommend this game as a stand alone game and a great way to get into the larger system of 40k. Also painting Kill Teams can take a day or a week depending on how much you put into painting. That is all for Kill Team today, look forward to different articles and faction break downs, then eventually we can rage against this meta as well!