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just wondering what the latest consensus was on it... is it fun?

my competitive days are long gone... i just want an excuse to push my little guys around.

is it a good excuse for dusting off my old minis?

Solid little skirmish game, it's good fun if the players aren't prone to analysis paralysis as there's a lot of decisions to be made and getting some of the rules text straight in your head may take a game or two (mostly regarding line of sight and cover).

I've enjoyed using it as an excuse to create a bunch of off-the wall thematic teams that have nothing to do with my bigger armies. Can recommend.

Loved the previous edition and would like to give the new one a spin, but the price of entry is too damn high for a skirmish game. If it must be 40K then just go with Combat Patrol( 40K at 500 points or less ), otherwise go with Stargrave.

Easily my fave GW game ATM. Alternative activation means that you're engaging with the game constantly, which makes it fun regardless of outcome. KT18 had way more flexibility in team construction, but that's about the only thing I miss from the old edition, everything else feels better IMO

For cheapest entry point, you can buy the starter box and sell the miniatures, that's going to be the cheapest way to get the core rules, tokens etc. Datasheets for the various teams can easily be found from many sources & apps, there are even some teams' sheets in WD issues (March 2022 issue features a new Harlequins team, for example).

Thx guys. Broke down and picked up the smaller starter without the terrain. 80 for two teams and all the extras seemed pretty decent.

Annoyingly you need a second box set to have the full 20 man rosters for both sides.

We found playing an intro game sans equipment and CPs helped get our heads round the basics and only took an hour.

How important is a full 20 man roster now?
The list building bit seems a lot less flexible which I don’t like the sound of. Like you have to just bring certain models now, even if you might want to build it as you want etc?

I've yet to have a 20 model force for any of my KillTeams, and so far I've been doing okay.

20 model rosters are required mostly for Narrative play. For Matched Play games, you can get by OK with only having the models you intend to field.

SamusDrake wrote:
Loved the previous edition and would like to give the new one a spin, but the price of entry is too damn high for a skirmish game.

You don't need any of the box sets and the wargear is mostly based around what comes in a box so you don't need 6 boxes of skiitari, for example, to have an optimised team. Lots of one box teams and no team that requires more than 2 to play.

Previous edition was great but it seems like all the changes they made with the new addition just made it worse.

 Scott-S6 wrote:

You don't need any of the box sets and the wargear is mostly based around what comes in a box so you don't need 6 boxes of skiitari, for example, to have an optimised team. Lots of one box teams and no team that requires more than 2 to play.

Nothing to do with the box sets, and the models aren't the problem.

The problem is the £30 price tag for just the softback core rules alone, then another £30 for the index( sorry, "compendium" ), just to get to the point of replacing the previous edition's core manual of £25, which included both rules and basic options for the majority of factions.

Toofast wrote:
Previous edition was great but it seems like all the changes they made with the new addition just made it worse.

Hard to speak of changes, when the two are fundamentally different games. For what it's worth, personally I like the new one a lot more as it is properly designed to be its own thing and not hung up on 40k-rules-but-not-really.

 Sherrypie wrote:
Solid little skirmish game, it's good fun if the players aren't prone to analysis paralysis as there's a lot of decisions to be made and getting some of the rules text straight in your head may take a game or two (mostly regarding line of sight and cover).

I've enjoyed using it as an excuse to create a bunch of off-the wall thematic teams that have nothing to do with my bigger armies. Can recommend.

If the players are prone to analysis paralysis, this is a far better choice than the bigger games. Much easier to keep the action going, plus alternating activations is great for pacing, not to mention strategy.

Huge rules improvement over 40k, hope some of it carries over.

I enjoy the game. Strats hopefully won't get out of control (but the future isn't that rosy there), but we play mostly with the compendium teams which are far more limited and it makes for a better game really (we banned gang cards in necromunda the other day. Honestly we want to play with our toys not play top trumps).

If I have one complaint (and it isn't with unbalanced teams) its that the community of people to play with are more like 40k than blood bowl. The latter has a bunch of common fixes for tourneys and the like that attempt to balance things out between the best and the worse. The former just seems to play vanilla GW rules and with a few exceptions GW regardless of how well they start off rarely can keep a ruleset good for long.

I would love a bunch of common buffs/unbuffs to be tested in different fora and adopted through consensus, but it isn't happening. Maybe its because those sorts of mods came out of active forums with sustained discussion (and have carried on to this day), something that social media doesn't really promote.

Dedicated groups take a while to form into such communities. Kill Team hasn't had a competitive streak like BB or Epic communities have enjoyed over the decades, fiddling and fixing things. More narratively minded folks, like the Inq28 circles, tend towards proactive houseruling but constantly switch between systems as fits their particular projects.

Meanwhile, I'm not too worried about strats. There's usually about six per team and the distinction between strategic and tactical ploys guides the gameplay nicely. Most are intuitive extensions of the team's strategies instead of sudden ass-pulls like they are in 40k.

The newer teams seem to have 8 strats and ploys... (Count chaos by their practical max's not total). Hopefully that is the ceiling.

The_Real_Chris wrote:
The newer teams seem to have 8 strats and ploys... (Count chaos by their practical max's not total). Hopefully that is the ceiling.

Oh yeah, you're right, it's eight and not six. Still not at unwieldy bloat levels, anyway. There's already usually 1-2 that never get used in that number. I doubt they'll go much beyond that, discounting the Chaos team that has smaller god-specific tricks, as there's more levers to use for adding complexity and variety to the factions (like we've seen with Warpcovens' psionics, Harlequins' dance routines and so forth).

 Sherrypie wrote:
Solid little skirmish game, it's good fun if the players aren't prone to analysis paralysis as there's a lot of decisions to be made ...

Can you elaborate? I watched a battle report recently and it seemed to be standard GW design, aka "move models in range of enemy models and roll some dice to see if they did anything. If you roll plenty of 6s, you're doing great.", hardly the level of creative problem solving and deep toolboxes I know from modern board games. What am I missing? What games do you compare it to, when you say "a lot of decisions to be made"?

I admit, I'd love it to be as interesting as some people claim it is, but it's a GW game and I've learned to have really low expectations for their designs.

For reference, to show where my expectations for "a lot of decisions" are, some of my favourite games are Gloomhaven or Warmachine (I don't mention euro-style games as they hardly compare).

It pretty much died around here after the last edition had done fairly well. People here just don’t want to drop $100+ just to start. The $40 core book from last edition had folks buying units from armies they would never build a large force for but that’s pretty much stopped in favor of just sticking with 9th.

Cyel wrote:

 Sherrypie wrote:
Solid little skirmish game, it's good fun if the players aren't prone to analysis paralysis as there's a lot of decisions to be made ...

Can you elaborate? I watched a battle report recently and it seemed to be standard GW design, aka "move models in range of enemy models and roll some dice to see if they did anything. If you roll plenty of 6s, you're doing great.", hardly the level of creative problem solving and deep toolboxes I know from modern board games. What am I missing? What games do you compare it to, when you say "a lot of decisions to be made"?

I admit, I'd love it to be as interesting as some people claim it is, but it's a GW game and I've learned to have really low expectations for their designs.

For reference, to show where my expectations for "a lot of decisions" are, some of my favourite games are Gloomhaven or Warmachine (I don't mention euro-style games as they hardly compare).

It's not as crunchy as the games you mention, nor trying to, being a rules-light one hour affair. By decisions I mean timing one's activations, weighing when to go on offence and when to lurk behind cover instead, juggling the objectives versus raw violence and so on. "Moving in range and rolling lots of sixes" is something I've seen people try to do and fail miserably, as KT21 is at its core a fairly mission-focused game where the winning move can often be to forego attacking completely on some of your operatives. A good player can very reliably spank a less acute opponent by utilizing the terrain and area control better than the other guy. When played between competitive opponents, almost every move is an interesting decision point because the game is very short, forcing you to take risks if you want to progress, while all teams can put out enough power projection to punish rash or unsupported moves (machine guns kill infantry in the open, who'd have thought ). Using varied terrain setups and missions beyond the somewhat sparse setups one often sees on GW examples also helps the game shine more.

It's a shame GW games suffer from an umbrella reputation as shoddy designs, when it's mostly their "too big to fail" flagships that deserve it while the smaller specialist systems constantly exhibit much stronger understanding of good gameplay. Epic, Blood Bowl, BFG, Warmaster, Titanicus, KT21, Underworlds etc. are all solid games punching above the usual 40k / FB fare.

There is plenty of nuance and tactical play in all of them, the only question is if that is smothered under horrible imbalance. Once two sides are relatively equal in potency tactical play becomes much more relevant.

Thanks Sherrypie for elaboration. You mention Blood Bowl though, as good design and to be honest I have played it for the first three times recently and think the game is atrocious It's extremely static, much too long for how (not!)dynamically the situation changes and most of all dishearteningly random, with probabilities stacked in such a way that whenever your team actually succeeds at anything you feel more like "whatever, I just got lucky" rather than "it was a difficult situation but due to my good planning several moves ahead and careful management of resources I managed to bring my success chance to almost a sure thing, so satisfying".

I guess this kind of design is just not for me.

Cyel wrote:
Thanks Sherrypie for elaboration. You mention Blood Bowl though, as good design and to be honest I have played it for the first three times recently and think the game is atrocious It's extremely static, much too long for how (not!)dynamically the situation changes and most of all dishearteningly random, with probabilities stacked in such a way that whenever your team actually succeeds at anything you feel more like "whatever, I just got lucky" rather than "it was a difficult situation but due to my good planning several moves ahead and careful management of resources I managed to bring my success chance to almost a sure thing, so satisfying".

I guess this kind of design is just not for me.

An interesting take, as Blood Bowl is first and foremost a risk management game where the player who can manage the randomness better through contingency planning wins almost every time

Good planning several moves ahead is precisely the thing in BB. If you take risky rolls before making safe moves to back up a potential catastrophe, you will eventually be punished for it. If you don't make deep penetrations with catchers or other fast players to scoring distances turns ahead in preparation for the time you can start pushing the ball upfield, you're not positioning correctly. If you don't have two or three back up plans for your offensive getting blunted or your defensive lines being punctured, you're exposing your plans to be exploited by a sufficiently daring opponent. Positioning, order of operations and stacked redundancy in planning-for-failure is extremely important in BB. The game has been highly appreciated by tournament style gamers for decades even without GW support for a reason, while also offering enough amusing shenanigans for the beer and pretzels folks at the same time.

How do you feel it's static? Sometimes there can be a grindy game with bashing teams like Dwarves and heavy Orcs going at each other or someone taking a whole halftime to walk a cage into the end zone, but for the most part I've always felt it to produce very dynamic games where the position of the ball can quickly upend the tactical situation completely, a sudden casualty on an important player requires new tactics on the fly and the inherent unreliability of rolling dice sometimes making a mockery of best laid plans in an instant. For context, I've played BB over ten years with as many teams. In leagues and tournaments it quickly becomes apparent who the experienced coaches are, because the game really isn't about being lucky but rather planning against the unlucky moments.

BB is one of those games where some remarks on warfare truly hold, like never interrupting your enemy when they are about to make a mistake

Cyel wrote:

 Sherrypie wrote:
Solid little skirmish game, it's good fun if the players aren't prone to analysis paralysis as there's a lot of decisions to be made ...

I admit, I'd love it to be as interesting as some people claim it is, but it's a GW game and I've learned to have really low expectations for their designs.

For reference, to show where my expectations for "a lot of decisions" are, some of my favourite games are Gloomhaven or Warmachine (I don't mention euro-style games as they hardly compare).

Far better than their core games. Team is 20 men and you pick from that roster to tailor to opponent team and mission. Its alternating activation's so you have those choices, very limited card play (3 CPs to start and they refill 1 a turn, so not dazzling use all the cards combo's), so those choices and its best summed up as a game where the team can all die but still achieve the win by doing the mission (very Hollywood).

 usernamesareannoying wrote:
just wondering what the latest consensus was on it... is it fun?

my competitive days are long gone... i just want an excuse to push my little guys around.

is it a good excuse for dusting off my old minis?

The overall design is competent, but unless you want to be severely restricted on list building, I wouldn't recommend it. That point was the deal breaker for me, so I am perfectly happy using a myriad of other generic sci fi skirmish game options that allow me to create the kill team I want to play instead of the kill team GW says I should play. But I value creativity pretty highly, so YMMV of course.