Making matters worse, while colorful and highly detailed, the double-sided game board in our set is warped and won’t lay flat on the table. That presents a huge problem considering that all the pieces in play — including the bits of terrain — are feather-light plastic. Just touching the board with the tip of a finger can tip things over or move them around. For a game of precise measurements and carefully determined line of sight like Kill Team, that’s unacceptable. Adeptus Astartes and 12 T’au Empire datacards for reference during your games, with a number of blank datacards supplied for building your own custom kill teams

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. Kill Team 2021? This is the second edition of Kill Team released as a standalone game, and was released in 2021. Prior to this, the original standalone Kill Team was released in 2017. Brand New Players: Where to Start Your objective will be defined on a mission-by-mission basis, but most revolve around accumulating Victory Points, which you win each turn by fulfilling certain criteria specified at the outset of the game. For our game, we could score victory points in each round by:

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There’s a lot to love in the new Kill Team Starter Set. However, there are also a few bits that could’ve been done a tiny bit better. The Ork Kommamndos sprue is a bit more difficult to navigate than the Kriegers’. With many of the components for individual models scattered almost haphazardly across the sprue, there doesn’t appear to be much in the way of rhyme nor reason to how things are arranged. Be prepared to have to do a reasonable amount of hunting for each figure. There are seven spures in the set: one for the Flayed Ones, one for the Heavy Intercessors, one for the Captain, two for the Chronomancer, and two for the scenery. He’s a little more fiddly to put together than his Space Marine nemesis: getting the staff to sit within the coils of his tentacles is a bit of a headache, but once you get it you’ll wonder why you ever struggled.

The rulebook in the Starter is the “compact” version, it doesn’t have all the same bells and whistles (like cards and dice), and the terrain set is essentially just the scatter terrain and not the full-on Orky encampment. This starter set is likely going to be cheaper than the Octarius box by a wide margin as well. The Starter will be a cheaper way to get into the game and will also be a cheaper way of getting all the components vs purchasing them individually. And yes, the Kommados and Death Korps are getting new boxed sets, too!Time and again we found ourselves missing rules, forgetting to account for extra tactics employed by the expansion – though, it has to be said, those new rules introduced in Pariah Nexus are quite nice and help add a few more interesting and random elements to the game. What I always find amusing about the art on these boxes is how, rather like in the Avatar: The Last Airbender TV series, in spite of the chaotic battle taking place between two heavily-armed and bloodthirsty factions and all the sharp edges, shooty bits and explosions, no one appears to have been even remotely injured. I think the issue is caused by the fact such fantastic, creative and unique dice are so readily available these days from so many different outlets that a handful of plain dice slung into a box feels like a bit of an afterthought. They can’t help but be upstaged by the outrageous Ork Kommandos, though. I’m not a particularly huge Greenskins stan, but, in the personality stakes, the greenskins blow the kriegers out of the water here, with an endlessly lip-curling smorgasbord of chunky weaponry, big yellin’ faces, and scrapyard couture that you can’t help but love. Give them Ali G-style luminous camouflage threads, and I’ll give you an extra point.

More importantly, though, is the change that states all firstborn Space Marines now have 2 Wounds to keep them up. Take control of Veteran Guardsmen from the blighted world of Krieg, and use their diverse skill set to bring down the horrors of the 41st Millennium. Hatchways are physical objects that must be opened for 1 action point, and play a big role in the space hulk setting. You can measure movement and line of sight through open hatchways.

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.