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

Product Information

As you may suspect, APL dictates how many actions (or things you can do) a unit can perform with each activation. If you were hoping to use your Kill Team of, say, two Reviers, a few Assault Intercessors, maybe a Bladeguard Veteran and whatever else, you’re going to be very disappointed. However, the obverse/reverse are a little disappointing, given that they’re almost identical to look at.

This is a really cool system that represents the back and forth in a close combat fight that would be too cumbersome to represent in a large scale game, but works brilliantly here! Sanguinius faced Fulgrim and won, Dorn charged Horus Ascended…and soon regretted it whilst Sigismund took not one, but two heads (Eidolon and Abaddon).The designs are absolutely bonkers; they’re a thoughtfully crafted blend of highly detailed and hilarious. Edit: Wow thanks guys, this hobby is super confusing when first starting out and you've helped a lot!

The saving grace is that he terrain is very simple to put together, with only three or so components a piece, so it’s easy enough to make sure the parts that slot together are in the correct place. It’ll just add insult to injury if and when those datacards arrive later and are sold separately, too. Alongside the rules, you'll find pages packed with lore introducing the dark and gritty world of Kill Team and insight into both the Collecting and Gaming sides of the hobby.If the Kill Team Roadmap is anything to go by, these rules probably won’t appear until well into the future and will require you to spend more money to obtain. What’s next is you pick a couple of weapons options for your sergeant and boom, you field a bunch of Heavy Intercessors and that’s your Kill Team.

Don’t worry though, as being “Double turned” isn’t really something that can happen in Kill Team – as we will see in a little while each player actually alternates activating operatives rather than one player moving all theirs followed by their opponent. 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. However, the new era of Kill Team that the box heralds includes many changes to the way the game works that will leave many fans feeling hard done by.The Core Book is your general, all-inclusive rules manual, whilst the Octarius Book contains all the extra bits you can use for playing your game in this particular Kill team setting. After all that – which occupies the first 50 or so pages of the book – you get the rules, which are spread over over 30 or so pages. Contains 17 new terrain pieces including ruins, platforms, and scattered refuse for creating your own ramshackle Ork shanty town. No chucking a Bladeguard Veteran or a standard Bolt Rifle-weilding Intercessor into your team to help individualise your force.

Tac Ops, on the other hand, while I haven’t had much time to play with most of them, are a particular stroke of genius, splicing the previous Kill Team’s objectives system with 9th Edition 40k’s wildly popular secondary objectives to add variety and narrative colour to your game plan. The Death Korps of Krieg, for so long only available in expensive Forge World resin form (in two flavours: ‘standing’ and ‘running’), make for a much more flexible and interesting bunch of miniatures than I, for one, expected. As always, this’d look great in a frame or tacked up on a hobby room wall – if it survives transit without any major scratches or punctures. 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. However, what the players need to keep in mind is that there are also Tactical Ploys that can be used during the battle and use the same pool of CP to play.And, when time came to play, actually getting up to an engrossing pace proved quite difficult – partly because the Core Book could be a mite clearer about a couple of key rules (more on that shortly), but mostly because I spent so much game time flipping between pages in the Octarius supplement booklet, looking up the stats for different operatives as they came up. The Core Book contains the rules for games of Kill Team and it’s here that we see that Kill Team really is quite a bit different than games of 40k. Still, such drawbacks are temporary; as Atom Smasher rightly notes, the Compendium is obviously a “stopgap” solution to make all factions playable in Kill Team 2.