Games Workshop - Kill Team: Octarius (2021 Starter Set)

Product Information

Apart from all that funny business about the movement gauges and symbols, there’s one other major source of consternation among would-be fans of the new Kill Team, and, as is so often the case with Warhammer, it’s about rulebooks and pricing. The new edition of Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team has been redesigned from the ground up as the greatest tabletop skirmish experience yet, and Kill Team: Octarius is the perfect place to start your campaign of clandestine missions. 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. The 40k concept of overwatch on a charging unit doesn’t exist, this is more so your operatives managing to get off an inaccurate reactive shot in response to an enemy action.

There’s an enormous amount of stuff in here, including all the dice, rulers, and what have you that you need to start playing the game. Back then, it was a cluster of ruined Imperial Cathedra; this time, it’s an Ork shanty town, so replete with ramshackle barricades and ramparts that you genuinely cannot use all of it in a game, because the dinky Kill Team board becomes too crowded.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 is the first proper release for the new edition of Kill Team, so there’s not really much else pertinent to this new edition available. The new Core Book comes with information on 9 different kinds of missions you can play to keep things varied and dynamic.

While there is a list of universal actions within the book, some operatives and factions also have unique actions only they can perform – and I imagine this will be expanded further in later supplements. Finally we get Spec Ops which is the Narrative Play module for Kill Team and where I feel the game is at it’s strongest. You’ll be shunting your Heavy Intercessors around the board and rolling to hit and to wound, and that’s about it. As with your operatives you are encouraged to create some background for your base – is it a strike cruiser in orbit for example, or maybe it’s a mighty Ork Fortress crafted from the destroyed tanks of your enemies? The Compendium, therefore, is also a bummer for long-time Kill Team fans with lovingly built, storied Teams on their shelves, made up of three or four distinct types of dude.I guess there’s nothing to stop you from converting the pants off your chosen Fire Teams, but it’s not quite the same as having unique figures and units making up your team. This was a decent book; even when looking through it as an absolute novice, I could tell it was a decent bit of kit, and it really helped me in my first couple of games.