Kill team has become one of my favourite game systems in the last few months so seeing this annual appear was a treat, if you are interested in kill team then this book is for you.

Games Workshop provided Sprues & Brews with a free copy for review purposes.

If you want to grab your copy why not head over to Element Games and support our site at the same time.

Here is also a link to the free rules for using a Space Marine Intercessor Squad in kill team which looks really good.

Overview of Kill Teams

The annual is a combination of all the Kill Team content from White Dwarf articles condensed into a single book, coming in at 152 pages it is packed full of content containing mission packs for multiplayer ( 3 and 4 player ) games, last stand missions and the sentries mission packs for using sentries in your games. All this content takes up the first 37 pages of the book with the rest being kill teams released in White Dwarf.

The kill teams covered in the annual include =

• Elucidian Starstrider’s
• Gellerpox Infected
• Warpcoven
• Hunter Cadre
• Wyrmblade
• Void Dancer’s

Each of the kill teams include =

• Narrative, detailing the goals and operatives of the kill team.
• Name generators for your operatives as well as your kill team, even giving you charts to roll on for quirks, backgrounds and operations.
• Kill team construction charts to assemble your kill team.
• Three Tac – Ops for each of the kill teams.
• Kill team abilities.
• Strategic Ploys
• Tactical Ploys
• Unit entries for all available operatives.
• Equipment.
• Spec Ops rules including equipment, battle honours, strategic assets, requisitions and agendas.

Multiplayer games

Multiplayer games are a great way to get multiple players involved in a game or campaign and kill team is a great game to experience it, the annual contains 3 missions for three players and 3 missions for four players.

This section explains the rules for adapting kill team games for a multiplayer format, players roll off before deployment and at the beginning of each turning point to determine which order players activate operatives, this is simply whoever gets the highest goes first with the rest of players going in a cascading order (2nd highest goes second for example).

Games are still played on the normal 30″x44″ board with kill zones being picked in the player order.

Tac-Op’s (which for those who don’t know are the equivalent of secondaries in standard games of Warhammer 40,000) are not used in multiplayer games but instead players can score up to 18 points from the primary objective instead of 12 which makes games a lot simpler also players do not use the scouting step in multiplayer games so no extra barricades or dashing an operative before the game begins.

Last Stand Missions

Last stand missions are exactly what they sound like, suited more for open and narrative play they have one kill team (defender) holding off against another (attacker) for as long as possible with the attacker always winning, in this section we get 3 missions that all follow this theme but I really like these missions for narrative play and how they can link in to other games.

Imagine a squad of sisters of battle holding out against waves of chaos cultists while buying as much time for civilians to evacuate or a grey knight strike team fighting off waves of daemons with no way off the planet the possibilities for narrative games are almost endless. 

We get 3 missions in this section which all sound appropriate for a last stand mission and rules for these games, setting up terrain is done mostly by the defender with restrictions on where the majority can be placed, the attacker gets the bonus of having dead operatives coming back onto the board after a dice roll (normally a 4+ but if they died in a previous turning point a 3+).

There are no tac – ops in use and the game does not end after 4 turns but instead goes on until the attacker achieves the mission objective, I like the idea of keeping track on how many turns a player can hold out as that could influence the narrative in a campaign or could be used as a scoring system between players as a way of determining who has “won”.

The defender does get to choose four last stand assets to aid them which include minefields, electrified terrain, reinforced cover, tripwire grenades and many more which can only be selected once each and are placed before the set up barricades step. There are a couple of pages showcasing some of these assets modelled and being used in games like a hungry squig patiently waiting in a crate to represent a tripwire grenade.

Sentries

The annual also contains the rules for playing 6 unique missions using sentry rules in your games, in these missions the defender must pick two of their operatives to be sentries while the attacker picks one operative to be an intruder, at the beginning of the game you play out a sentry phase with a kind of mini game where the attacker and defender both roll off and the winner moves the sentry D6 inches.

If at any point a sentry discovers the intruder the defender finishes activating their operative and then you play a standard game of kill team immediately after, the rules for detecting an intruder are fairly forgiving, the intruder must be with square of a sentry or within pentagon of the defender’s top zone.

There are different circumstances which depends on the mission being played that can also raise the alarm such as if the intruder activates three or more objectives in the mission Secure the Approach. Overall I really like this section as I think its really well written as it feels very engaging with the mini game before playing a game of kill team.

Conclusion

At first glance I wasn’t happy that this annual was all content that we have seen before in White Dwarf articles but after sitting down and going through the book I really did change my mind, the first good thing is that all the content is together in one book and not spread out into multiple magazines, carrying too many books / magazines to a friends house or event is something I actively try to minimise so that is always a win when these annual sort of books come out.

Secondly I think all the content is interesting to me, if you are more interested in matched play then having the rules for all the kill teams is a must while the sentry and last stand mission packs add some great content for narrative gamers, I am very excited to play a lot more kill team at the moment and playing a last stand mission sounds really enjoyable especially with all the last stand assets.

The multiplayer games look cool but i’m not sure how often I will be using them as I usually prefer to play 1 vs 1 but they are still really good to have and if you are planning a games night then I could see them being really good fun.

In short if you are interested in kill team I would pick up this book for the amount of high quality content you get is fantastic.

Thanks again to Games Workshop for sending Sprues and Brews a free copy to review.

Published by Andy

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