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While I enjoy the background and the models for 40K, the rules bloat and the large scale of the game today don't stir much excitement.

Has anyone here tried out the One-Page rules, specifically for One Page Kill Team? I'm just wondering how well they play.

The rules bloat gets exaggerated; if you're playing Kill-Team you already get to strip out the vast majority of the mess (I'll take a count of how much of the rulebook you actually need to play Kill-Team in a bit). You don't have to deal with wound allocation to mixed squads, formation/detachment requirements, 4e-vintage Forge World rules, order of operations on Destroyer attacks/stomp, flyers, the Psychic phase, which effects are and aren't 'saves'...

One-page rules tend to play fine once, and get steadily more boring as you play them again and discover that you don't actually have the power to do anything interesting with them (most fan one-page rules fall under this heading), or they lie about being one-page rules because they're just as complicated and they've shunted all the complexity out to model special rules instead of the core document (Age of Sigmar did this). A set of stripped-down rules that lets you play Kill-Team properly is probably closer to 8-10 pages long, and doesn't lose detail/gameplay interestingness along the way.

have read some, personally I prefer Heralds of ruin kill teams if looking for more simple but still a challenge

I really like both One Page Kill Team and One Page Fantasy skirmish. A huge amount of the 40k rules bloat does not "add meaningful choices" but rather just functions as tons (and tons)of situational modifiers to remember. Used to be there was less than 25 Universal Special Rules.

Recently they changed the rules so each figure gets a Quality Stat, and a Defense stat, rather than Quality being for everything. They also made all the descriptions more generic so the GW Black Hats can't go after them, so there are no more copyrighted names/weapons in their rules. I like the addition of a second stat, as Quality wasn't quite enough.

I'm still using the older rules as not all the army lists have been converted to the new ones yet, though I plan to convert once things like Stormcast and Ogre Kingdoms make it into the new "Age of Fantasy: Skirmish".

The fun part of the One Page Rules is that games play nice and fast, and everything is also alternating activations, which are much more fun than IGOUGO.

 AegisGrimm wrote:
...Used to be there was less than 25 Universal Special Rules...

This metric isn't entirely fair, there are a lot of things that are sorted under USRs now that existed back in 4e with it's 25-ish USRs but were sorted somewhere else (Apocalypse templates and Destroyer weapons were in the Apocalypse rulebook, Barrage and Template were weapon types, Force was a single weapon rather than a keyword...).

I've discovered a searchable pdf of the rules to 40k and tried stripping out unnecessary bits to see what'd happen. The rulebook is 200 pages, but about half of that is pictures/diagrams, about half the remainder is flavour text and padding. Of the remaining 50 pages or so figure 30 deal with things that don't matter in Kill-Team (psykers, units, vehicles, large weapons, that sort of thing) or deal with common-sense things (how to measure, how to roll dice...). Take the remaining text and put it on normal-sized paper, and you've got a 10-12 page rulebook*. Add in a page or two of text and numbers for each Codex you're looking to use, and while it's no one-page rulebook it's far, far less bloated than running the full game.

(*If you're using HoR (which still allows psykers) and vehicles you may have to stretch this out to 20-ish pages.)

But to play Kill Team via GW I still have to purchase a $75 rulebook and a $50 codex, and that's over $100 without any money spent on models.

KT in 40k has always been a throw-away afterthought; not as bad as Fantasy Skirmish was, but still pretty poorly done. And while I *could* do what you're suggesting in cutting down the 40k rule set, I'd rather start with something built bottom up with that design in mind. So if I were to do that, I'd actually go more with 2nd edition codices and Necromunda rules. And there's still lots of fiddly bits left.

But that is, again, work that I don't want to do.

I'd say give the One Page rules a try. They are free, so as long as you can get a friend to try them with you, it's not like you are out anything more than a couple of printed pages per player. They really do distill 40K down into a fun, casual beer-and-pretzels format.

The 40k rules make for a full length game, but the 40k skirmish rules (used to be called One Page Kill Team, now I think it's something like "Grimdark: Firefight", or something) only needs a handful of models per player, a 4x4 table, and usually only lasts 4 turns, so the games are really fast and compact.