Test the tables: If you have the opportunity, test the configuration of the tables before the event. Your local players will be glad to help and can provide important notes about what works and what doesn’t. I did have a few problems with building some of the terrain pieces, though. A lot of the buildings are held up on support pillars that need to be attached individually (this applies to all four of the larger Ork structures, the oil rig, and the two smaller bi-pod platforms). None of these pieces of terrain, however, have obvious moulds or indentations to guide where you are supposed to attach these supports. Before we jump into how to place terrain though, we have to talk about building with a purpose. In Kill Team – especially if you’re setting up tables at competitive events – you want to build layouts for a particular mission. The process here is: Range and movement gauges. You’ll have seen these bandied about the internet. Instead of the “measure everything in inches” spiel we’ve all got used to from playing, I don’t know, just about every other wargame or TTRPG ever, the new edition of Kill Team ties everything you can do with your figure to these, uh, plastic shapes. Take them for what you will. The Octarius book provides nine Narrative Play missions to choose from, and all of them use the Octarius Killzone terrain in various layouts, and they really take advantage of the new terrains’ ability to be fit together in different ways and form a single, large building. My favorite of these is Evac Inbound, which sees one team fighting a desperate battle to fend off enemy forces until reinforcements can arrive.

Vastly improves the bearers ability to move vertically (climb and drop) for the rest of the battle. This is difficult. This is supposed to be a review of a boxed game. And yeah, whilst I think the Kill Team: Octarius box, as an isolated release, is absolutely smashing, I am concerned what the wider changes to the new edition of Kill Team mean for players. Your Drop Zones must be safe. And I am not referring to just the drop zone, but to the whole deployment. The last thing you want is for the player who goes second to lose the game when an errant blast kills off half their team. Making the drop zones safe makes the game more competitive and viable for more teams. Placing heavy terrain near the drop zone (or in the drop zone if it has no vantage points to offer) is a good start. And be sure to get coverage for the entire Drop Zone – give players some light terrain to work with as well. Kill Team 2nd Edition won’t be all about one-off scraps to the death. Its Spec Ops campaign mode lets you field your operatives across persistent narrative battles, earning new skills and equipment along the way. GA refers to how many models can be activated. Whilst most operatives have a GA value of 1 some have higher values and can have more than one operative do something in a turn.Seriously, as we said before this is fundamental for making good tables. You should also also mark the drop zones before building the table, if possible. Not only will this help you better understand how players will use the terrain, it’s helpful and saves time for players. Masking tape is ideal for this. Keeping Tac Ops in Mind We don’t yet know how much the Kill Team: Compendium supplement will cost at launch, how long it is, or what else it contains, other than thebasic “rosters and datacards, including stats for all the available operatives”. Generally, you want your tables to have balanced layouts, where there’s a good mix of features on either side for players to work with, and broadly similar features – both players have equal access to similar terrain features, though the specifics may vary. And note that balanced doesn’t necessarily mean symmetrical – we’ve shown several examples today of balanced tables which are not symmetrical.

There are no fewer than 11 sprues in the Octarius box. Now, you may be thinking that that doesn’t actually seem like all that many for a box this large. However, the majority of the sprues are dedicated to scenery, and there is some chunky bits of the stuff in here.The Kill Team rules have been completely rewritten for the new edition, and terrain has been given the same attention as everything else. Each piece in the box has a defined set of rules that affects how your operatives interact with it. Thankfully, though, GW has generously provided Wargamer with free review copies of both Octarius and the Compendium – so I canshare my thoughts on how the thing turned out, who I think it’s for, and – ultimately – whether it’s any good. Since I’m a bluff old traditionalist, we’ll start at the beginning, with the big, brash,tangerine-coloured box of toys GW is using to fanfare its newest game. As players get closer to the center they should have less cover to work with, but objectives shouldn’t necessarily be death traps, either. Put less heavy terrain around them and more light terrain to encourage combat and force opponents to climb to a vantage point to try getting a better angle. You can even have some objectives with no cover at all and let the players place up some barricades or leave it empty to spice things up! And about that… Barricades

We don’t yet know if Fire Teams have any relevance in-game, or if they are merely for list-building purposes – but, given Kill Team 2.0’s apparent focus on force flexibility as a highly variable attribute between different factions, we wouldn’t be surprised to see multi-Fire Team factions able to deploy more widely, or in different ways, given their largernumbers.

The Drop Zones

After that, the rest of the book is given over to rules, rules, and very more rules. There’s a huge amount of faction- and warzone-specific stuff contained in the Octarius book, so we won’t get into it here. It’s a heavy ol’ read, so not one for bedtime. Warhammer 40,000 Kill Team: Octarius Review – Wargear There are heaps of extras too: additional pouches, grenades, and, of course, there are even a few iconic shovels. Meanwhile, the particularly eager Breacha Boy isn’t about to let minor obstacles like solid ferrocrete walls get between him and a scrap. As always, I haven’t been able to fit the fully folded-out game mat into my lightbox. However, today I’ve engaged my brain (a hard thing to do on a Saturday morning) and realised the board can be partially folded out to give you a look at what is printed on both sides. Finally, make vantage points relevant. Yeah, they can be a problem but don’t forget that vantage points are an important mechanical part of the game. If the players see them more as a nuisance or something to avoid rather than something important, we’ve messed up building the layout. Doors and Hatches

All the tokens are double-sided and often display different icons to denote different things. We’re not going to get into this now, we’ll be here until the next Kill Team release, and I’ll probably have to do it all over again for that. At the other extreme, you’ve got elite warriors like the Adeptus Custodes. You may only get two Custodian Guards in a fire team, but each warrior is extremely potent and more than a match for most opponents. Your Kill Team will also nowbe subdividedinto one or more Fire Teams, depending on your faction – a mechanic intended to add structure, and differentiate between elite Kill Teams like Space Marines (who can only take one small Fire Team) and squishier factions like Imperial Guard, who (as you can see in the graphic above) can field two, with more operators in each.If you aren’t leading a Snakebite horde, but still fancy barrelling your boss head-first into the enemy atop a monstrous squig, this kit can also build a Beastboss on Squigosaur. Things only get worse when you turn to the datasheets in the Compendium. Swathes upon swathes of the units listed in the compendium have absolutely nothing listed under Abilities or Unique Actions. You’ll be shunting your Heavy Intercessors around the board and rolling to hit and to wound, and that’s about it. As you place terrain, put some heavy elements in the center of the table. You want to break up lines of sight so it’s difficult or impossible to see from one end of the table to the other. Important in any wargame with shooting, and important here. Make the terrain dangerous as you advance on the table Burna Boyz, Rokkit Boyz, and comms specialists add their own strategic options to the Kommandos, but you’ll have to wait to find out more about them – they’re still under deep cover.