[Kill Team] Quod Erat Demonstrandum | the Starter Set experience

I had a plan, for this Bank Holiday. I was going to pop down the valley to the Market Hall, where there was a toys and collectibles market, and also DragonPainter would have some gaming tables for D&D and Kill Team. I thought I'd get a couple of casual games in, mosey around the fair, maybe do a little shopping...

... and then it transpired that there wasn't actually a person to run the Kill Team tables, and I could hardly leave a new FLGS in the lurch, so that person turned out to be me!

Pretty nice MDF terrain as well. Reminds me of second edition, but chonkier.

Readers (both of you), I am here to tell you I had a really nice day. It turns out that the new Kill Team Starter Set is very well set up for demonstration games, with a kind of scripted tutorial that takes ten minutes tops and teaches you how to shoot, how to save against shooting, how to fight a round of melee combat, and how to touch divots and perform activities.

From there, one continues through a series of small encounters - two or three models a side - that teach the Action Points and Orders and introduce you to your Angels of Death or Plague Marines gradually, and finish with a proper game of Kill Team Lite - full squads, three objectives, kill points and four rounds.

The morning session skipped a few beats, as my willing victim - we'll call him G-man, for reasons that make no sense to anyone but me - was passingly familiar with the Warhammer, all 40,000 of it. Nice gent, bit older than me, he'd played Rogue Trader and second edition, and still had his copy of Gorkamorka in the loft. As such, he was feeling very confident and, after we'd had a quick run through the Orders tutorial, progressed to the finale and kicked my rotten butt straight back to Barbarus. At least I had the pleasure of melting one of his lads with the dreaded Plague Wind and walloping another with a giant rusty flail. I've had worse games. Also a 14-7 defeat is very Nurgle branded. Silver linings, right?

In the afternoon, I had a quiet couple of hours, nattering to various older residents of the burgh about their sons who'd built enormous dioramas in their bedrooms and gotten paint all over the carpet, stains are still there fifteen years later, cheeky blighters painted SQUIG on the wall in black primer and all. Young hobbyists - don't do this, please, you didn't pay for that wall and it'll be a faff to cover up when your mammy wants to move out. Graffiti the garden shed instead.

But then I had an adorable teen couple slow down and express a passing interest off the back of Space Marine II, and I tried more or less the same thing - scripted tutorial, then jump to the full fat game. That was a bit of a misstep - seven figures a side and introducing three new mechanics all at once to people who've never wargamed in their life was a Lot, and I should have done the APL and Orders tutorials instead - but the general state of battle banter suggests a good time was had regardless.

In the end, I didn't need to spend the weekend farting out the Nemesis Claw warriors after all. Not that I'm complaining: four members of the Ablative Brotherhood are ninety per cent done, and I would have a Visionary and Heavy Gunner done if my Stormy Blue hadn't revealed itself to be basically chalk solid and my thinner hadn't revealed itself to be empty.

I've also acquired the full Kill Team 2024 rulebook at last, and I have to say it's a very well laid out and organised little volume. Suffering slightly from style over substance, as the portion I've read is the grounding "in the Grim Darkness of the Far Future" bit and it's mostly an art and model showcase, but what I've read of the rules is clean, presentable, and well paced. Suffers a bit from the extremely marble mouthed clause creep of modern GW rules, but I can't really hold the house style against an individual game. You can have terse, evocative common-sense prose, or you can have the doomed attempt at ultimate precision with no loopholes, but you can't have both.

Kill Team continues to be a bleddy good time, that's the point I'm trying to make here. Alternating activations and the spikiness of critical hits make the games rattle by quickly, and there's theoretically a lot of depth possible with the range of primary and secondary objectives on offer. Careful and mutual selection of those, and the terrain requirements, should be able to Forge an adequate Narrative without the need for any additional bells and whistles. 

As such, nemesis mine has been signalled, and the next events of the Sector Maledicta campaign have been staked out. Following their victory at Eign's Gate, the Night Lords have dispersed across the sector and beyond, and one champion has charted his course for St. Wulfruna's Haven. Defended by a single squad of Astartes, split between the ground and the orbiting Gladius frigate, the colony is ripe for plunder - and for provoking the loyalists into doubling back to face their real enemies.