The new edition of Kill Team brings the tightest and most cinematic special operations you could ever hope to find in the 41st Millennium. But it’s not all about one player taking on another in intense battles of covert skill – there is a brand new way to play.
Introducing: Joint Ops. The Joint Ops Mission Pack (found in the Core Book) is your first introduction to co-operative and solo game modes in which players test their skills against an artificial opponent governed by a simple, solid set of rules.
Joint Ops are player-versus-environment – or PvE – missions designed to offer a unique playground for commanders to test their skills, teach Kill Team to a friend, or try out new teams and strategies. The three missions contained in the Kill Team Core Book reinforce this concept of teaching skills and casual play, while future mission packs will expand the concept with new challenges.
Players start by selecting their kill team, which can either be a single faction with the operatives split between each person, or two halves of separate kill teams merged together. There are no restrictions for what you can choose or how the operatives should be assigned, so if you want to see what happens when a handful of Ork Kommandos are forced to team up with T’au Pathfinders, go right ahead.
Your opponents for these missions will be a team of non-player operatives, or NPOs, who represent a larger force of less elite troopers than your usual kill team. This means that you’ll often be outnumbered – though never outgunned – and will have to rely on your human intuition to overcome the brute force of their programmed behaviours.
Each model on the opposing team is assigned one of two NPO behaviours that dictate how they move, attack, and assign orders in the killzone. Brawlers are all about closing the distance and getting stuck into close combat, while Marksmen hang back and shoot – aiming to protect any objectives they see.
How they resolve conflicting rules and split decisions is quite simple – they do whatever is worse for the players. In fact, the NPO behaviours and Threat Principles that govern how they act are so simple they fit entirely on one page!
The NPOs themselves are chosen through a flexible process. Missions have a tally of Wounds and NPOs are chosen from a list of universal datacards until they meet that amount. These datacards are completely model-agnostic and represent a variety of different unit types, so you can use whatever miniatures you have in your collection.
For example, the Tough NPO has the Brawler behaviour, 10 Wounds, a 4+ save, and a powerful melee weapon, and works for feral Genestealers or Khornate daemons. Likewise, the Heavy Marksman has all the characteristics of a Space Marine operative, but if you wanted to pop an Einhyr Hearthguard or Hive Guard into its place, you’d do fine.
The missions themselves include deployment maps for both Killzone: Volkus and Killzone: Gallowdark, and their simple objectives bely the immense amount of fun to be had trying out new kill teams and seeing what wacky hijinks a combination of Drukhari Mandrakes and Adeptus Arbites troopers* can get up to.
We really mean it when we say the rules are no more complicated than that, and after a few games ushering your NPOs across the board you’ll get the hang of controlling them like it’s second nature.
This is just the beginning of co-op and solo play, providing a framework that will be expanded in the future. There will be new missions, enemies, killzones, and even more exciting mission packs coming for free online and in future products – so keep your eyes peeled as the new edition develops.
You’ll have plenty of time to check out all of the other Kill Team rules and reveals coming to Warhammer Community soon, and if you want to make absolutely sure you’re not missing any info, sign up for our newsletter.
* Insert your own oddball team-up here.
