The current season of Kill Team continues with a new expansion featuring 2 new kill teams, both masters of covert operations, and a new campaign style to fight in. In this article, we’ll take a look at how the new kill teams play and the new campaign style.
Kill Team is a skirmish wargame set in Games Workshop’s larger Warhammer 40,000 setting. As a skirmish game, Kill Team features a small number of elite troops, fighting special operations battles, rather than huge battles fought with entire armies. We’ve covered Kill Team in depth since the first edition, and you can read our review of the current Starter Set, or the set that kicked off this season, Kill Team Tomb World.
Hunter vs Hunter
Kill Team Dead Silence is an expansion for Kill Team and requires a copy of the Kill Team core rulebook, dice, and a measuring tool to use. The campaign is set in a Tomb World, so having a copy of the Tomb World box will also give you the scenery to keep it thematic.
The full box contents are:
- Kill Team Dead Silence Dossier
- 6x Adeptus Astartes Wolf Scout kill team miniatures (5x Space Marines and 1x Fenrisian Wolf)
- 8x Tau Stealth Battlesuits kill team miniatures (5x Stealth Battlesuits, 2x Drones and 1x Beacon)
- Datacards and tokens for both kill teams
- Campaign map and log pads
The new map-based campaign, the Ctesiphus Campaign, sees players exploring a map, rolling randomly to determine the type of surface or tomb location, and then fighting a battle using the location rules that a kill team is on. Players can build camps, destroy other players’ camps, and use supply points to move around the map. There are also rules for playing it using the solo/cooperative rules for Kill Team.
Awoooo!
The Space Wolves get their first dedicated kill team with the Wolf Scouts. This kill team, rather than being made up of novice Space Marine scouts like those from the Salvation expansion, the Space Wolf Wolf Scouts are made up of veteran Space Marines, who prefer to operate independently, away from their brothers. They do serve the same purpose as the scouts in other chapters, taking on shadowy, clandestine operations, they’re just a lot more deadly.
The Wolf Scout kill team is made up of 5 Wolf Scouts and a Ferisian Wolf, and has 6 operator choices, plus the standard Hunter, so you’ll have to make a choice between them when selecting your kill team. You’ll also have to make a choice when building them between the Pack Leader and Frosteye (but you can use the parts on another body if you wish), but if you want to build all 6 specialist operatives, plus a standard Hunter, you will need to pick up another set when they go on sale seperately, or get hold of another 2 Space Marine/Space Wolf bodies and use the extra components from this set.
When the Wolf Scouts go to battle, they bring the storm with them, which is represented by a token, and any operative within 6 inches of it activates any bonuses on their profile card. The Wolf Scout Gunner for example, ignores the hot rule on their supercharged plasma gun, and it gains the punishing rule, allowing you to turn a fail into a hit if you roll a critical.
My auto-take choices for the Wolf Scouts are the Fangbearer, who allows your entire kill team to ignore any stat modifiers from being wounded, even if they’re incapacitated during the game, and the Frosteye, who can go on guard within your storm and remain concealed. I love the thematic rules for this storm-powered sniper, shooting from within a blizzard.
Only Ghosts
The Tau Empire is a group of technologically advanced alien species that look to collect others to their cause through peaceful means, but are happy to use violence if required. Their previous dedicated kill team was made up of Pathfinders, long-range reconnaissance operators. But now they get their first elite kill team, featuring Stealth Battlesuits, which make use of light-bending technology to remain invisible.
The Stealth Battlesuits kill team is made up of a Shas’vre, the leader, a marker drone and a gun drone, and a selection of 4 specialist operatives, or the standard Infiltrator operative. In the Dead Silence expansion, you get 5 miniatures, so you’ll have to choose if you want to build all the specialists or drop some for standard Infiltrators. All operatives also have a choice of burst cannon, with high attacks that can reroll any results of 1, or up to 2 fusion cannons, which are shorter range but higher damage. So you will also have to make armament decisions before building your miniatures, or pick up more Stealth Suits to build the different options.
My favorite Stealth Battlesuit operatives are the Lodestar, who has a chance to gain bonus CP each turn, depending on how far the homing beacon is from your drop zone. My other favorite operative is the Designator, who can mark enemy operatives if they’ve a valid target, which gives any of your operatives targeting that enemy the option to turn a normal hit into a critical if you don’t roll any crits at all. This doubles up with the gun drone to mark targets, which is especially helpful for making sure you get that Devastating 4 for auto wounds from the Fusion Blasters.
All the Stealth Battlesuits have stealth fields, which means when they have the conceal order, they’re not visible to enemies more than 3 inches away from them, keeping them safe until they close the distance with the enemy, and are ready to attack.
Kill Team Dead Silence Final Thoughts?
Kill Team Dead Silence contains 2 great new kill teams. Both have some great thematic play styles, with the invisible Battlesuits and the Wolf Scouts storm rules. Both factions are also masters at what they do, with the Wolf Scouts excelling in close combat and the Stealth Battlesuits being masters of range. They offer some great games against each other, and while the map-based campaign is a welcome addition to Kill Team campaigns, it would have been nice to have some thematic missions to play these teams off against each other and some more scenery to build up on the Tomb World set.
The copy of Kill Team Dead Silence used to produce this review was provided by Games Workshop.
