[After Action Report] Close Encounters of the Kroot Kind | Kill Team (Into The Dark)

+++ SPACE HULK "KAISERION" +++
+++ 9#!%024.M42 +++
+++ FIRESTORM NEBULA +++
+++ MERTH'YROD GAP +++

In which a Kroot boarding party from the warsphere K'rrak'nm'atti encounters various adversaries and, technically, prevails.

I've been Kill Team curious for a long, long time. Back in my day, Kill Team was a tacticool action movie type 40K experience in which one player's squad of heavily converted hard cases took on a swarm of mooks, goons or minions controlled by another player, maybe with some sort of horrible boss monster lurking at the end of the encounter.

It looked great and I got to play it once against an opponent who was not very well equipped to teach mechanics, or play with honesty or integrity, and who just wanted to tick a box in his own campaign progression anyway.

Nowadays, of course, Kill Team is a sweaty-type skirmish wargame in which both players control an elite force of hard cases: unless, of course, someone brings a Compendium team to a pick-up game against a proper Kill Team with the full suite of individual warriors. This would only happen if you and your learned opponent were not perhaps the best at communicating intent in the arranging-games step of the process.

First Encounter: Legionaries vs. Cadre Mercenaries

Whoops. I was apparently meant to pick one of Kraken's teams for this one and learn the ropes, but long habits of self-starting kicked in and I might have gotten into the weeds of KTDash and produced a bare bones Legionary team - four lads with chainswords and bolt pistols to Keep It Simple, Slaanesh, plus a monster Champion with the Undivided blessing and a deadly plasma Gunner who'd drawn the eye of Tzeentch.

Despite multiple Turning Points of snapping away at any Kroot brave enough to show its quills, the comparatively low numbers of the Legionaries caught up with me. The thing is, Kill Team is a divot touching game, and operatives need to stand on the divots in order to "flip" them each turn. When you only have six operatives, taking two of them out of the fight in order to touch divots isn't a great idea, but if you don't do that, you fall behind on points.

Maybe I needed to abandon Conceal orders and Mission actions and simply bum rush, counting on Chaos killing power to wipe out the Kroot and flip their divots? Still, I may have been behind on one point in the scoring, but I'd killed more of them than they had of me. The Dark Powers are pleased. Probably.

Second Encounter: Tomb World vs. Cadre Mercenaries

This time, I brought along a more basic team in line with the balanced "nothing complicated" learning experience. Five Necron Warriors and five Flayed Ones. Much slower than the Chaos Space Marines, and for all their vaunted Living Metal, not terribly resilient. Kraken, meanwhile, had the Kroot Hounds on board, and those little green puppers would prove to be... a problem.

It turns out that terrain placement is of great importance when one heads Into The Dark, and if your vibes based approach has given you a narrow corridor that you can only move one model along at a time, it's really easy for you to be boxed in by nimble little doggo buggers that your Warriors struggle to kill and your Flayed Ones can't reach to attack. This kept two of my operatives out of play for two whole turns, and considering I had two hanging back to touch divots and score points, meant I was trying to take on the entrenched Kroot with only six Necron bodies.

As you can see, it's a bit of a shooting gallery. Every Necron that tried to touch either of these divots ended up being shot, then Overwatched and shot again, and sparking out before it could score more than one point. It was this encounter which taught me that Kroot's Group Activation means they're very often finished activating before another team of similar quantity, which means they're going to be Overwatching, a lot. This didn't come up against the Legionaries, who had fewer models than them, but more activations. Complicated stuff, this skirmish gaming.

The pernicious birdmen of Pech didn't have it all their own way, though. While Flayed Ones take half an aeon to get where they're going, they don't half mess things up when they arrive. Five attacks, generating additional hits on their criticals, means very dead Kroot, and this one alone accounted for two opposing operatives.

I should also note that I was very, very jammy with my opening shots, killing two Kroot outright with Gauss fire in the opening turn, and it took that smart move with the Hounds and my Warriors being too ponderous to fall back/too inept to kill them with bayonets to turn the encounter back around.

Third Encounter: Traitor Marines vs. Cadre Mercenaries

This space is currently reserved for rent, as I was sick as a pike on the last club day. The plan is to pick up with two relatively-but-not-terribly complex teams, start feeding in some equipment and tactical ploy rules, and see how those shift the tempo of things. I'll be back to talk about that next month, all else being equal.

In the meantime: Kill Team! I like it, and I'd probably be happy with it as a Main Game if I wasn't up to my neck in Necrons and army scale 40K already. There's a lot of depth to each team and a lot of breadth from the variety of teams available, and that could provide a lot of interest in the long term. Lots and lots and lots...

Narratively, I am already mentally sketching in the drift of the space hulk Kaiserion, offering opportunities for fringe forces outside of the central Necron/Astartes/Tau conflict of the Sector Maledicta to make their presence felt. (Yes, there are Tau, and one day one of our Tau players will do something with them.)

Mechanically, it reminds me a little bit of the original Necromunda/Gorkamorka rules, and the second edition of 40K on which they were based. It's a combination of the highly bespoke equipment that each operative can carry, the crossfire quality of shooting (where it'll normally take two operatives to take out one), and especially the close combat mechanics, which have a "roll your attacks and dice fence" system that could be straight out of 1994. 

It differs in the alternating activation mechanics, and I do like an alternating activation. I wish initiative was a bit more sophisticated than "both roll a d6 and see," since the first action can be quite an advantage in scoring terms, especially late in the game where there are fewer bodies trying to touch more divots. I suspect that the minutiae of ploys and operations probably unravel this somewhat and give you other ways to interact with the victory discs, though, which brings us back around to the "easy to learn, hard to master" nature of the game.

Definitely scratches an itch, and will definitely let me expel my urges to paint Chaos yabbos without committing to four-Codex Chaos projects. I'm thinking Death Guard first: painting some proper Nurgle pieces has been a long time coming.