Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team

An unexpected player absence turned a planned RPG night into a Kill Team tournament, and in the end I did not regret it at all. Now that I have some experience with Crisis Protocol as well, the two systems feel fairly close to me. I narrowly prefer MCP as a game, but Kill Team clearly has more material for campaign play — practically half a library’s worth. With the time I have available right now, though, a miniatures campaign is a midsummer night’s dream; straightforward, honest violence is more than enough for me.

On the table, Kill Team is what I expect from a skirmish game: small miniature clashes, plenty of tension, and battles decided through the confrontation between the teams. The 2021 second edition initially made a very good impression on me, because games felt balanced without too many of the ugly excesses that can kill the mood.

Interaction is direct and combative, as it should be: the teams go straight at one another, and the game delivers the laughs and violence it promises. The problem is that this strong foundation depends too heavily on which factions meet. When the power gap opens up, it is not enough to admire the nice skirmishes; you start looking at the list and wondering who signed off on it.

Overall, Kill Team remains a good low-cost skirmish option, and our games produced genuinely good laughs. V2 has done serious work on the fundamentals and, when the two kill teams are at reasonably similar levels, it offers exactly the clean, enjoyable confrontation I wanted. Thumbs up — with one eye permanently fixed on the balance updates, because somebody has to.

Updated session

The later games did not overturn the fact that the game is fun, but they changed how much I trust its balance. The new balance sheet exposed enormous gaps between certain factions and everyone else, with good old GW looking as if it had made heavy use of hallucinogens while writing the army lists. Even so, the situation is not hopeless: even in tier 1 versus tier 4 matchups, such as Grey Knights against Daemons, the scores remained fairly close. So the initial positive impression still stands, only now it comes with a much louder reservation about balance.