Prior to The Fall of the Eldar, a subsection of Aeldari civilisation saw the growing hedonistic debauchery around them and decided to go on an Exodus to pure untouched Maiden Worlds to be one with nature and distance themselves from the happenings back home. These Eldar became the Exodites, and in Kill Team Exodite you can command a super elite force of these dinosaur riding warriors against the forces of the Beast Snagga Orks!

Massive thanks to Games Workshop for sending us over a copy of Kill Team Exodite to check out on the site. In this full review we’ll be checking out the new Kill Team set, seeing what is included in the book and building and painting the awesome new miniatures!

If you would like to support the site then why not pick up your copy through our affiliate Element Games and save yourself some money too?

We’ve also filmed a full unboxing and review of the new set which you can see just below or over on YouTube

So let’s get back to nature and see what is within the Kill Team Exodite box!

Kill Team Exodite Review

The Exodites are probably one of the most requested model ranges in Warhammer 40,000. They have been in the lore for a very long time but have not had models in 40k! That’s not to say they never had models sculpted at all – they did get a range designed for Epic 40k, and models got shown off, but outside of the rare eBay appearance they stayed legendary

its been decades since then, and a lot of people have been craving these oh so cool models get counterparts in Warhammer 40k, and with Kill Team Exodite we are finally getting the models we have all dreamed of for years!

The Exodite box (RRP £98) is the first place to get your hands on the new models, but also is a pretty ace Kill Team box in it’s own right – It is kind of a shame that the models are going to overshadow the set itself, because there’s some really good stuff in here – but let’s get the big one out of the way, the new models!

The set contains a full Kill Team of 3 Exodites accompanied by 2 smaller Draklithes, and they are ever bit as gorgeous as you can imagine!

There’s actually a couple of different builds available here, and I suspect full 40k rules for all of these will be on Warhammer Community as you’re reading this. First up is the way I built them, the Kill Team itself.

Designed for Kill Team (but also usable in 40k as a trio of characters for your Exodites) the Dragon masters are essentially three different mounted characters. The Clanblade is an aggressive close combat character, the Stonesinger is a new Exodite Psyker and finally the Leystalker is a sniper very reminiscent of the Rangers.

Each of the three Dinos (or Dragons as the Eldar call them) have unique heads identifying them as slightly different breeds – the Leystalker for example is on a more stealthy and sneaky one, where the Stonesinger is riding a Dilophosaurus inspired poison spitting one (yes I know they didn’t really spit poison…). This gives you some nice variety and a unique identity to each of the beasts.

What’s interesting is that the kit can actually also be built as a 40k only unit, the Dragon Knights (Oh, that sounds familiar… See the Epic models above!)

This is a fast Cavalry unit for the Eldar, which kind of feel like they should be Shining Spears on Velociraptors! At the time of writing this I’ve not seen the rules for these yet, but after painting the three in this box I’m already keen to get three boxes of these once they are available by themselves so each of my characters can have their own squad to accompany them!

These were brilliant fun to paint up, but if you’re going to paint them yourself I would recommend splitting them into a couple of subassemblies. It’s pretty easy to leave the dino, the rider and the equipment bag that sits across the saddle as three seperate parts – this makes drybrushing the dinosaur a lot easier and means you can get to the detail on the rider without having the dino in the way. Likewise the equipment bags glue across the rider locking them in place, so leave this off until the end to make sure you can get it all back together.

It’s not just Exodites in the box though, as you also get a unit of 10 Beast Snagga Boyz (RRP £38) and a unit of Squighog Boyz (£42.50) – this makes the box a pretty good deal in terms of savings, though if you are not interested in the Orks and don’t play Kill Team you might want to hold fire until the Exodites have their standalone kit to pick them up. If you do play the game though there’s some pretty ace stuff within Kill Team Exodite.

You get all the usual Kill Team accessories such as cards for all the units in the box (including NPO profiles for the Orks – sadly this doesn’t include any rules for running them as a regular Kill Team), tokens and even cards for the campaign. As the Exodites are an elite force you actually get a wallet for each hero and battlescar cards that are popped into these wallets between games to indicate them taking damage between battles in the containing campaign – this is very cool and feels close to what we get for Warhammer Quest games.

The box also contains a full transfer sheet for the Exodites covering the main clans found within the Exodite supplement itself.

Speaking of the book, Kill Team Exodite contains an absolutely gorgeous hardback supplement with gorgeous full cover artwork that feels a lot more premium than the softback books we’ve previously had in Kill Team. In a world were 40k is getting softback books again it did make me smile that Kill Team is getting fancy hard back books within the set!

Out of all the Kill Team books so far, this one does feel very much like “Codex Exodites”. The first 33 pages are dedicated to the lore and does a full deep dive into the background of the Exodites, who they are and why they left Eldar civilization to start a new life on a pure untouched Maiden World. We’ve had Exodite lore in the Codexes across the years, but it was great having such a rich collection of Exodite background in this book. It’s accompanied as ever by gorgeous model shots and brand new artwork, and I have to admit that the sight of Pterodactyls circling overhead in the artwork had me scanning the background for any more signs of future model releases…

Lore I expected, what I didn’t expect however was a full 20 page section of the book dedicated to making your own Maiden World by using a combination of card, rocks, plastic fish tank plants and wood! This really took me back to classic White Dwarf magazines with guides to make every single element of terrain that they have used within the book! There’s pieces of heavy and light terrain with fallen tree trunks wrapped in foliage and jungle undergrowth, Ork Totems that use the AOS Bossrock Tower but heavily convered with chain, coffee stirrers and plasticard along with 40k components to make fortified Ork watchtowers and even guides to making the Eldar monoliths and temples seen all over the model shots for this release – You even get the full templates with full dimensions to make every single piece of this including the guide to put them together.

And while just the guide to make the scenery would have been an amazing addition to the book, there’s also full painting guides to match these to the studio scheme seen within the book.

This is excellent, and I really hope Kill Team Exodite starts a precedent of Games Workshop doing more terrain building and painting guides such as these. Even if you don’t play Kill Team this is worth celebrating for 40k scenery, and I’m going to use this to build my own board’s worth of terrain!

So what about the rules? Let’s take a look at how the Exdoites play!

This is a very elite Kill Team, and one that is very different to every one we have had before them. You get the three Dragon Masters and their two Drakolithe scouts making you outnumbered against most opponents – but the way they work is very novel, they kind of remind me of the Spire Hunters from Necromunda.

You start off with just the Drakolithes on the board, and in the first Firefight phase you get to place your Dragon Masters touching your kill zone edge, which costs a single action point to do.

Each of your Dragon Masters gets to activate twice a turning point, with your 4 APL split between each of your activations – These actions are a little different to normal, as they cannot make Charge, Dash, Fall Back or Reposition actions – instead they get access to two new ones.

Turn costs 1AP and allows you to turn your operative up to 45 degrees – there’s actually a couple of dongles in the box that help you do this. While turning your models costs you AP, moving them is actually free once per activation. Sprint allows you to move directly forward 9″ or directly backwards 3″ in whole 1 inch increments. you’re allowed a single free turn during this move, but otherwise you are on a railroad in a straight line with them. This makes them super quick but a little cumbersome to maneuver sometimes, but really captures the feeling of this being a creature running forwards that is being steered by the rider.

The mounts actually go through a number of different “Speed” brackets based on how fast they are moving, and these give you different bonuses the faster you go. So if you move between 4-6 inches you become Speed 4+ and get to retain a free defense dice, while moving 7-9 inches makes you speed 7+ which allows you to retain one as a critical! There’s ploys and upgrades that trigger off these rules too – so you’ll always have a target speed you want to try and get to. The important thing is you’re going to need to have the space to get this speed up, as you’re moving in a straight line it’s going to be possible for the enemy to try and disrupt their movement as best as they can, and hitting another operative’s control zone during this move counts as a charge.

The Drakolithes activate as normal, however they also get a bonus based on how far they move – though this is very cleverly worded as “distance from original location” so you can’t run around in a big 8 inch circle and come back to near your starting location to gain a speed bonus – the intent here is the further they move in a single move from their original location the faster they are moving.

Each of the 3 Dragon masters has their own profile and list of 5 unique upgrades each – of which 2 can be picked for each Dragon Master before the battle, which gives you a nice element of list building even though you have a set roster. All of them have a 3+ save and 24 wounds, but they never get cover or be obscured from light terrain making them quite vulnerable to being taken out by focused fire.

The Dragon master Clanblade is your combat specialist – he, like the other riders, has Lethal 5+ on his melee weapons, but with 5 attacks and a damage of 4/6 he’s pretty reliable, and that’s before you add the 6 attacks with Brutal and Damage 3/5 on the mount! He’s got an interesting piece of armour that reduces the piercing of any incoming shots if no crits are retained.

He’s got some cool upgrades such as the ability to bounce back shots lightsaber style when someone tries to shoot him too close, do additional damage when he charges or make it so that only attack dice of 6 can be retained when attacking him once per turning point!

The Leystalker is your sniper and while he isnt quite as good as the Clanblade in combat, he instead has an ace ranged weapon with devastating 1 while on the move, but hitting on 2s with devastating 3 while stationary.

His upgrades are also really fun, such as the ability to remove Obscured from targets or shoot into combats, shoot while sprinting or even to have a free sprint or turn at the end of the firefight phase.

The Stonesinger is our healer, able to heal a single Dragon Master 2D3 wounds for 1AP, or heal the entire Kill Team D3 each, which is awesome! He also has an ace psychic melee weapon with Shock and Stun along with a torrent weapon to represent his mount spitting acid!

His upgrades revolve around giving him new psychic powers such as the ability to remove debuffs on friendly units, reduce the movement of enemy operatives or increase the Speed level of friendly units.

I think these are going to be a fun one to play, but I feel they are going to have a higher learning curve than some other factions, and it’ll take a couple of games to get a feel for how much you need to put into turning your steeds before charging forwards!

The last half of the book is dedicated to an entire 20 mission campaign that pits the Kill Team Exodite force against the Orks! The terrain used in this campaign is the stuff that it teaches you to build earlier in the book (The Ork Scrap Totem is just used in a single mission, and you could easily proxy this with something else) with all the dimensions needed listed in the book. There’s also a section here for people who have no interest in building their own terrain and it will list the pieces of Volkus or Octarius that are closest to the pieces suggested in the campaign – For me though, building the bespoke Maiden World terrain from the book is going to be a priority before playing this one, and I feel that makes it really special and feel very “old school” for those who are a similar age to me!

Your Kill Team starts with no upgrades, and over the course of the campaign they will start to earn more upgrades to make them stronger, but if they are incapacitated during a battle there is a chance they gain a battle scar – these cards are kept in the wallets included in the box and act as a reminder that they are injured, with Battle Scars locking the Dragon Master out of one of their upgrade slots.

There’s also an Ork event deck in the box that acts as the NPO playing Strategic Gambits during the game, adding a little bit of chaos and random encounters to the mix!

There’s NPO datacards for all the Ork contents of the box, each with their behaviours listed as usual allowing you to play through the contents of the box solo or in co-op (this would work really well as a three player game, with each player getting a Dragon Master each!)

There’s also an optional Datacard for an “adversary” model in the form of a Beastboss on Squigosaur – if you use these rules then you keep a track of how many games you have won, with you rolling and adding this number to see if the beastboss “spawns” during the next game – once you’ve faced him there’s a roll to see if he returns based on how many times you’ve taken him out, with a chance of you getting rid of him for good, or him escaping to lick his wounds before he comes for you again!

The campaign itself is very replayable with lots of branching missions and 3 different “Narrative paths” you can choose to follow a couple of games into the campaign – you might for example choose to engage in Guerrilla warfare against the Orks, or instead awaken the World Spirit to scour the entire planet… Each of these different paths will take you through different scenarios and there’s 8 different outcomes at the very end of the campaign depending on what you have picked and how the battles have played out, which is very very cool!

Summary

So what do I think of Kill Team Exodite? Well this is without a doubt one of the coolest sets that Games Workshop have put out, just for the fact that it contains a faction that a lot of people have been wanting to see in miniature form for decades now! But while the models are the star of the show, the rest of the package is brilliant too – the Orks are always nice to have (and a nice addition to your Ork army if you picked up Armageddon or the Starter Set) and are really fun to paint up. But the Kill Team Exodite book itself really is fantastic, not only packed full of Exodites lore, but having a really brilliant campaign with full and detailed instructions to build and paint your very own set of Maiden World terrain, something that should really be celebrated in 2026! I’m excited to build and paint my own set and chronicle the adventures of my own Exodite force here and over on YouTube soon!

Kill Team Exodite is up for pre order today and is released Saturday 8th August.

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