Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team

Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team v2, the 2021 ruleset, made a better first impression than I expected. I still give Marvel Crisis Protocol the narrow edge as a straight combat system, but Kill Team has an enormous body of campaign material waiting for people with the time to commit to it. For my purposes, a brisk fight is already an ambitious evening.

At its core, Kill Team keeps the action at small scale: opposing teams of miniatures meet in a contained skirmish. From round to round, its attention stays on immediate tactical choices and the fight across the table, rather than insisting that every game become an episode in a sprawling campaign.

That produces the interaction a skirmish ought to produce. Both sides hit, pressure and try to force an advantage in a compact contest. My early games felt unusually even, without the usual army-list nonsense bursting through the floorboards. A promising start. Games Workshop had, naturally, not finished with us.

At first, v2 had the unusual virtue of letting a battle be decided on the table rather than in a forgotten appendix to an army list.

Updated session

Later games preserved the laughs and the violence, but they revised my optimism about balance. After the new balance sheet, the gap between some factions and everyone else is wildly out of step; the lists have the calm logic of a meeting held under sedation. Even so, tier 1 versus tier 4 pairings, such as Grey Knights against Daemons, still produced fairly close scores. It is not hopeless. It merely asks the players to tolerate inequities the system does too little to correct. It remains a good low-cost skirmish, provided you understand that its balance is not a promise but a polite suggestion.