Games Workshop - Warhammer 40,000 Kill Team Starter Set

Product Information

The new Kill Team: Pariah Nexus expansion hurl us face-first into the grim and claustrophobic skirmish warfare of the Forty-First Millennium. But how does the new Ninth Edition-friendly box shape up? Warhammer 40,000 Kill Team: Pariah Nexus Review – Summary There are some noteworthy exceptions ( Craftworlds, Custodes, and Imperial Guard) but generally you’ll have a better experience if you start with one of the teams specifically crafted for Kill Team and learn how to play with fewer special operatives. If complicated rules are getting in the way, you can always proxy more of your operatives as “Warriors” at the beginning, then bring in more special operatives in later games. Teaching Kill Team to Others Up next is the Psychic Phase. Your magic-users of the far future blow each other (or themselves) up – or not, depending on range, psychic ability, and so on.

And, since no faction’s Kill Team canconsist of more than two Fireteams, this means quite a few of the currently available Kill Team configurations can simply only have one or two types of miniatures in them. Space Marines, who can only have one Fireteam, are especially hit by this homogenising effect.But, for my part, as a Kill Team newbie, I found it refreshing to have everything required for a proper, furnished battle board right there in the starter box – as opposed to getting a boatload of brand new minis, only to have todo battle across bare, arid dining-room table, with only teapots and pepper grinders for cover. Others, though, didn’t seem to come into play at all, and we were left wondering if and when they should be applied. Eventually, to keep the game moving, we just focused on trying to shoot/shank each other – which was great fun! The Intercession Squad is a fully fleshed-out kill team, with a complete set of rules including Equipment, Tac Ops, Strategic Ploys, and Tactical Ploys. The Assault Intercessor Sergeant is worth a mention on his own – once armed with a power fist or thunder hammer, he’s a terrifying powerhouse of the Emperor’s wrath in close combat. It’s a good book, too. Rules books can often be daunting tomes rammed full of minutiae and errata that serves more to confuse than enlighten. The Kill Team Core Book, however, is a well-written exercise in brevity and structure that other creators of rules manuals could stand to learn a thing or two from. Still, it’s not exactly the easiest thing to learn to play from, simply because there’s so much info in it. At least, in Kill Team they do. Firefights take place in such close quarters that very few weapons need to worry about range, and most can shoot from one side of the killzone to the other.

The Kill Team Starter Set tokens come on a perforated board that you’ll need to push them out of, just like the one below. The Dark Angels Space Marine in this article was base coated with an airbrush using a tutorial by Cult of Paint and Citadel Contrast paints , and the rest was done with brushes and more traditional paints. The Necron’s armor is painted with one of my favorite combinations — Balthasar Gold with a blue patina of Nihilakh Oxide . The grenade in the hand of the Necron Chronomancer and the brightest details on the Pariah Nexus terrain shown here use a brand-new Citadel paint called Tesseract Glow . At the end of round 5, with the Space Marines almost at full strength and the Necrons down to their final figure and final wound, it was all over for the Necrons. Victory Points were tallied up, and the game ended.

Still, after a couple of games, minor assembly niggles fade into insignificance – and the book-passingfaff ceases to be a real concern, as you’ll have memorised most of the key bits and bobs for both Kill Teams by then. Octarius is, for the most part, a well put together, well presented starter set – and, once you settle into this game’s rhythm, you won’t mind so much about the stumbles along the way, because (spoiler) Kill Team 2.0 is a really good game. However, this isn’t so easy to do with the Kill Team Starter Set. Whilst all the miniatures in the box are available in their own individual kits, a lot of the value of this box lies in the other stuff that comes with it to help you actually play the game, such as the rules books and the combat gauges. There’s another photo of this later on, all set out for battle, so if you’re interested, be sure to keep scrolling!

Actually putting together those krazy Kommandos was as frustrating an experience as I’ve had assembling Warhammer models in a long time, with each model’s constituent parts apparently scattered at random across three medium-sized sprues. This was normal in GW’s bad old days – especially with large, bespoke sprues for boxed games – but other recent offerings like Dominion were so gloriously straightforward to build that this old-school, Where’s Wally-style search for parts really caught me off-guard here. When explaining how a rule works I like to mix in the in universe action along with the detailed rules. It makes remembering things easier when the chainswords clank before a mighty eight foot tall Astartes is cleaved in twain. That effectively means that, Octarius aside, for existing Warhammer collectors and players, this edition of Kill Team is twice as expensive to start as its predecessor was in 2018. Meanwhile, if you’re a prospective new Warhammerist intrigued by the new Kill Team, but don’t own any models yet, it’s even pricier, as you’ll have to buy:As far as the rules went, however, whilst they were great fun (once we eventually got our heads around them), even as novices we agreed that the expansion felt heavily weighted in favour of the Space Marines. With plenty of tactics to support shooting and cover, and a lot of the map filled with corridors and open spaces, the Flayed Ones were damned from the get-go, and once they were out of the way the Chronomancer never really stood a chance. Warhammer 40,000 Kill Team: Pariah Nexus Review – Price and Availability