On the wounds side, models in Kill Team have lots of wounds.
In addition to these, weapons have a number of Attacks, BS (What they need to hit), and Damage values, plus they can have extra special rules that apply to them.W, Wounds, is how much damage the model can take before it falls over dead.SV, or Save, is what you need to roll to save when defending.DF, Defense, is how many dice you roll when defending with the model.GA, or Group Activations, which tells you how many models of this type activate at a time – most models activate one at a time, but for swarms and hordes you might activate multiples (Poxwalkers activate 2 models at a time, for example).APL, or Action Points Limit, which determines how many actions they can make in an activation.Movement, how far the unit can move when making a Normal Move.Models in Kill Team have 6 characteristics, only a few of which are shared with their 40k counterparts: Gone are the Warhammer 40,000 statlines that governed models in the old game. One of the most striking differences with the new Kill Team – along with the way damage is handled, which we’ll discuss in a moment – is the complete redesign of unit datascards. There’s a ton of new stuff going on here, so what we’re going to do is pick out some of the highlights to talk about in detail before summarising our overall thoughts at the end. Rather than having models activate by phase, models in Kill Team now have a number of Activation Points (APL) they can spend to act however they please in a given turn, allowing for greater flexibility when it comes to moving, shooting, and fighting in addition, all of these actions are dramatically different in 2.0, driven by completely new datasheets and unit characteristics. So Kill Team 2.0 uses alternating activations, but the way it handles these is entirely different from the 2018 game. This is where players alternate activating models to move, shoot, and fight The Firefight phase, where the majority of the action happens.The Strategy phase, where players spend CP to use Strategic ploys and reveal hidden objectives called Tac Ops.The Initiative phase, where players roll off to determine who has the Initiative.Games in Kill Team 2.0 take place over four rounds – called Turning Points for some reason – and are split into three phases: The Council of Exarchs or spamming 12 of the same model with a plasma gun is dead and gone. The new Kill Team borrows much of the sensibility of Warcry, giving us models with a dozen or more wounds, and much more fixed teams, giving players some flexibility but reducing the wide-open nature of teams. So let’s start with the basics: As you might have seen already, everything in this new game has been completely redone, and in almost every instance, that’s a good thing.
There’s a lot in the box but right now we’re mostly interested in the game rules
So how does the new game stack up? Are the new rules a triumph or another minor tragedy? Let’s dive in and find out.īefore we do that however, we’d like to extend a “thank you” to Games Workshop for providing us with preview copies of the new Kill Team boxed set for this review.
Everything about the game has been overhauled, right down to the fundamentals of the datasheets which now bear only a faint resemblance to their 40k counterparts. The good news is that Kill Team 2.0 – set to release in two weeks – is a completely new game, rebuilt from the ground up with all new rules and design sensibilities. Then 9th edition dropped and brought with it the Combat Patrol rules that gave us a perfectly workable way to play small, fast games of 40k set against that was the final Kill Team release for the first edition, the Pariah Nexus box which we could only describe as “cynical,” leaving the game to die an ignoble death. A dismal ruleset with unit stats lifted almost wholesale from full-size 40k and an overall feel of lots of rolling achieving nothing much didn’t help, nor did a deeply confused set of expansion releases which stepped on each other’s toes and created even more conflict in determining what the game was actually for. It simultaneously aspired to be an entry product to 40k, a tight competitive game for tournaments, and a narrative game for campaigns, and accomplished precisely zero of those things. The original Kill Team – well, the “original” Kill Team meaning the version of the game that was released during Warhammer 40k’s 8th edition in 2018 – remains one of the more baffling standalone games in the GW library.