Sunday, 19 May: Kill Team Match

The game board for our Kill Team match

My friend and I got a game of Kill Team in this past Sunday.  I thought he was going to play his new monster legion dudes (converted Chaos Space Marines) and the dogs from hell (War Hounds) but he opted to play a mixed force of Dark Angels with a few Death Wing terminators added in.  I went with the Blackstone Fortress (BSF) team.

Typically we play 5 models each but he decided to read the rules (gasp!) and figure out the point cost of his force and was able to bring 8 models to the table to my 6.  According the the rules (rules, schmuls) for using the BSF models in Kill Team, my force totals about 200 points while his 8 models comes in at 120 points.  But (I argued), because we scaled down the BSF force's abilities and wounds to enable a more balanced game, I didn't think it was actually 200 points.  For example, we cap all models at 2 wounds; a lot of the BSF team has 4 wounds in the book.  We spend a lot of time working out rules for our guys to try and achieve a certain balance to our games.  The result is that we win (or lose) games based on the tactics/strategies we use on the board vs. having a model (or two) that can mop the table without breaking a sweat.  When we are hashing out rules, my friend always asks, "why wouldn't you take that every time?" whenever there is a hint of an overpowered rule or model.  Which makes sense; UR-025 has 4 wounds and can gain a wound back each round (in the book).  Taken as is, he could just stomp all over the board killing things and it would take a whole lot of fire power to bring him down.  I'd take him every time just to keep everything focused on him in order to accomplish my mission.  But scaled back to a 2 wound model and removing the self healing rule brings him more in balance.

For the record, I am not a rules guy.  Sure, when I started playing Warhammer 40k, I learned the basics (move, shoot, assault) but the guys I played with pretty much all had PhD's in the rules and were steeped in game knowledge, so I would just rely on them to school me.  For me, I just enjoyed the camaraderie and the fun of seeing cool models, terrain set ups and pushing toy soldiers around the board for a few hours.

Our deployment zones for this match

 After yakking away for a good amount of time, as we are wont to do when we get together, we got in a game.  The way I set up the board combined with our initial deployment zones had the effect of splitting the board in 2 due to all the cover.  That wasn't by design on my part, I just set stuff down on the board until I feel it fits the story I am trying to make with the setup.  I didn't see it until he pointed it out to me.  He is like me in that he likes a good story behind a setup vs. setting up terrain in a cookie cutter way like tournaments do to avoid giving advantage to one side or the other.  So he soldiered on and played the game.  We both ended up obtaining our objectives so it was a draw (mine was the center of the board objective and his was to kill UR-025).

UR-025 made it almost to the end of the game but finally succumbed to my friend's firepower

A fun afternoon of pushing models around and talking shop with my friend.  That's the life!