New edition of Warhammer Kill Team fixes a weird rule I’ve always disliked

A new edition of Warhammer Kill Team has broken cover, and it’s due to land this October with revised rules, a fresh battlefield, airborne units, and accessories festooned with a very 40K amount of skulls. This last bit is what I’m most excited about, to be honest; it fixes a problem I’ve had with the skirmish game for a while.

Listen, I still think Warhammer Kill Team is one of the best tabletop wargames out there (and because each pack is so self-contained, it’s a good gateway to the hobby for those more used to the best board games). But there have always been some wrinkles that feel needlessly confusing, the main culprit being measurements. Before now, everything used a system based on shapes to judge distance – one inch was a triangle, two inches was a circle, and so on. Because literally every other wargame under the sun uses inches, this seemed unnecessarily awkward and not entirely logical. How far off is that soldier? Oh, easy – he’s a square away. Clear as mud.

Anyway, the new edition is finally swapping to inches. Thank the Emperor for that.

There are plenty of other changes on the way for this fresh edition of Kill Team, of course. Warhammer’s announcement notes that streamlining was the name of the game here, and “everything has been rewritten from the ground up to make the lore and rules clearer and easier to read than ever before, with design notes and examples in the margins to clarify any tricky situations that might occur.” 

You’re also getting new accessories to deploy as well. Alongside the classic barricades, you can put down physical barbed wire, smoke grenade, mine, and ladder models to help or hinder.

These miniatures, the new core rules, all-new cardboard tokens, a board’s worth of terrain, and two Kill Teams are included within the edition’s launch box – Kill Team: Hivestorm. This brings us a new campaign setting in the Chalnath Expanse sector called Volkus, a human planet dominated by hive cities and massive, settlement sized guns that loom over the warzone. This is why the scenery you’re getting inside the box is based on ruined city buildings rather than the oil rig-esque terrain of Bheta-Decima introduced via Kill Team: Salvation. In fact, Volkus will be our battlefield for the next year’s worth of Kill Team expansions.

Unsurprisingly, those multi-tier buildings are perfect for the two groups included in the box. These warring factions revolve around flight and claiming the high ground, with the jetpack-weilding Tempestus Aquilons (a squad of hard-as-nails humans) going up against the insectoid Vespid Stingwings. The latter recreate aliens we’ve not seen in Warhammer for around 20 years, and the modern Vespids – which are auxiliaries of the Tau Empire faction – are much more dynamically posed than their predecessors. I’m not normally a fan of gribbly xenomorphs, but these gun-toting bugs look as if they’ll be a lot of fun to paint.

We don’t have an exact release date for Kill Team: Hivestorm yet, but it’ll go up for preorder this September ahead of an October launch.

Want something new to get your teeth into while you wait for the new Kill Team edition? Be sure to check out these must-have board games for adults. To boost your collection for less, it’s also worth checking in with the latest board game deals.