Kill Team?

We’ve a potential new player joining our current group of three! We currently have me, primarily a Guard player, Dave who plays Tau and Paul who plays Blood Angels. Our potential new player, Jon, doesn’t know what to get so we thought that a game with our models might help him out with his decision.

He seemed keen on getting something no one else has so it’ll be interesting what insight he will  gain from playing a game with our models. Because that’s one thing we surely can’t help him with, models or armies we don’t own.

Introducing a New Player

What this little discussion is really about though is, what’s the best way of introducing a new player to the game of 40K? Large scale battles are of course out the window because they’re simply too overwhelming for a novice, plus they take longer, and a long game may be off putting to some new players. So something short would suffice, perhaps a 1,000 point game I thought at first. But we are only likely to get through one of those games in the evening we have and that means we’ll only get to use two armies.

I’d like to use more armies if possible because we have at our disposal Blood Angels, Regular Marines, Guard, Tau and Tyranids. Someof those forces are limited in numbers as I only have the starter sets from Shield of Ball for example. So Kill Team seemed the most obvious choice as its smaller, quicker and therefore will allow us to use more armies to give Jon a broader experience of the armies available.

Issues with Kill Team

I have written about how I Love Kill Team in the past and that’s because I do, but I do have an issue with it and that’s the victory conditions. It’s all about killing, there are no objectives and that’s something I really enjoy in regular games of 40K.

When the objectives are stripped from a game then the whole dynamic changes and its no longer the same game. It feels, to me, less strategic. All you’re doing is killing as many models as possible to force the enemy to take a leadership test in the hope they will fail it. It’s not very colourful is it?

Does This Already Exist?

I know there is a whole wealth of missions out there for 40K, so a fix or alternative to the above may already exist. If it does please let me know in the comments at the end of this article, I would really appreciate any pointers to mission that are similar to Kill Team.

A Proposed Fix

This little issue I think can be easily rectified by adding in objectives and making Kill Team more like a regular game of 40K. I am thinking 3 objectives, one worth 3 victory points, one worth 2 victory points and the final objective worth just 1 victory point. The game will use variable game length as this adds a nice dynamic as to when the game will end and when one should, or should not, grab objectives. I also think that playing secondary objectives will work, minus Line Breaker, which leaves Slay the Warlord and First Blood as these objectives are no different in a smaller game than a bigger game.

So we have three objectives for a total of 6 VPs, a single VP for killing the enemy Warlord and a single VP for first blood. But I think something is missing, this seems simple and balanced but does it offer a rich enough experience?

If you have an suggestions or missions in mind please do comment and get in touch!