4th Edition Kill Team Lives!

I love small games.

What can I say?  I’m a roleplayer at heart, and though I do love the fiddly feel and look of a bunch of toy soldiers running around, it’s getting to tell a story with them that really gets me going on my hobby.

It is this reason that I decided to keep my 4th edition 40k rulebook, and why I have never felt the need to buy the 5th edition hardcover: 4th edition was chock-full of special rules, scenarios, and even came with the expanded rules for playing kill-team missions.  5th edition came with a bunch of (essentially) ads for GW products.

The rules for 4e kill-team aren’t available anywhere that I can find legally, but PDFs are floating around the net if you just have to get a copy.  The 5e “kill-team” mission from the Battle Missions scenario book is a decent substitute, but as I was looking for a small-scale game I could play on a campaign basis, 4e kill-team had the extra rules and complexity that made it possible to do without a ton of work on my part.

To that end, I got a couple of buddies together before our Bible Study last week, and we had a go at the game.  Enjoy the pictures (after the fold), and then I’ll talk about my opinions.

The Basic Gaming Table

The lighting is a bit better here for seeing the surface.

The “Table Legs”

The Setup

The Kill-team going in for the…er, kill…

The Objective and its Defender

Mission Accomplished – sort of

A Good Space

So, what about the game?  It needs some rules expansion to make it worth going back to every week.  The movement of the brute squads is rather predictable, and a decently equipped kill-team can shoot down all the brute squads without ever really moving.  I think that shooting should do way more than simply add a single klaxon counter to the store – d3 counters sounds about right, maybe, unless you use a sniper weapon.  I don’t know exactly how I would do that, but I’m looking forward to figuring it out.

The missions also need to be a bit…varied?  I know the missions in the book are starting points, but they don’t seem to have enough variety in them to even extrapolate from easily.  I think if we make any more that I’m going to post them so that you guys won’t have to do all the annoying work.  Don’t hesitate to give me your scenarios if you like, either, by the way!

I really do like the specialist kit that both sides can take, but I want to add more to the brute squad list, and modify some of the existing entries for both lists.  There are some choices that are no-brainers (las traps), and some bizarre choices that I can’t imagine any incentive for ever taking (red-shirts, for example).

All in all, this is definitely something I would come back to however.  Having a loose system like this means that we can actually get six games in in the 2.5 hours before Bible study (for example), while having the flexibility to make more rules is actually kind of fun.  If you decide to play this, I’ll let you discover the joy of pulling normal models out and suddenly finding a new purpose and use for them.