Although your games of Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team will be focused around specific mission objectives, there are always opportunities to eke out extra success from every deployment. Enter the Tac Ops secondary objectives, which you choose before the game begins, worth a solid stack of victory points that might just be the difference between victory and defeat.
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Before we look at the Tac Ops themselves, here’s how they’re selected. Every kill team has one or more archetypes,* and these correspond to categories of objectives found in the Kill Team Core Book.
This ensures that every kill team is tackling objectives suited to their skills – your rowdy Ork Boyz, for instance, will happily leave all that sneaky Recon nonsense to the Kommandos.
Once you’ve chosen your archetype, you build a small deck out of its six Tac Ops card options.** Draw two at a time, select one and discard the other, repeating until you’re left with three secondary objectives to complete. The Kill Team Tac Ops cards are invaluable here, reducing the need to flip frantically through a rulebook.
Here’s the clever bit – the objectives you choose are hidden until it’s time to score them. Some give your opponent a moment’s notice, such as when your operatives make a sudden dash for their drop zone, while others come out of the blue and make a good move (for you) even better.
Even kill teams with just one archetype, such as the Veteran Guardsmen, can support different play styles. You may want to stay back and keep your operatives safe with Hold the Line and Damage Limitation, or advance and secure the killzone with Plant Banner and Central Control.
And as we saw with the matched play game mode, your objectives are chosen after you find out what mission you’ll be playing, so you can pick the Tac Ops that best suit the situation on the battlefield.
You can make your pregame much easier with your own pack of Tac Ops cards, which come with two full decks of objectives. They’re also included in the phenomenal Kill Team: Octarius launch box, so grab yourself a copy*** before they’re all gone.
* Those assembled from multiple fire teams can select any archetype either fire team covers.
** Some factions, including the two in Kill Team: Octarius, have three of their own objectives that can replace any from your archetype, and the TacOps card pack includes numbered cards for this very purpose.
*** Where available – it positively flew off the shelves in some areas.