I hear a lot about the Warhammer 40,000 skirmish game, Kill Team, and people seem to really love it. In fact, there's a significant player base out there who seem to like it more than 40k. I was curious enough to investigate, but not $145 NZD curious (the cost of the Kill Team Starter Set, so I bought a first edition Kill Team rulebook on Trademe for $5 and read it from cover to cover. This blog post is my attempt to answer the eternal question of whether Kill Team is the "right" way to get into Warhammer 40,000 or just an all-out replacement that removes any need for Warhammer 40,000 entirely.
The big difference between Kill Team and Warhammer 40,000 is that the Kill Team is a "skirmish" game. That's wargame-speak meaning that in Kill Team you play with maybe 10 miniatures, which is at least 30 fewer miniatures that you're likely to use in a Warhammer 40,000 battle scenario. In other words, a Kill Team is a specialist strike force that moves in for a specific mission, while Warhammer 40,000 is a battalion marching across a battlefield. The scale is completely different. What's not completely different are the rules.
The 2018 rules for Kill Team are surprisingly similar to 2023 Warhammer 40,000 rules. There are minor differences here and there, but the overall flow of both games is essentially the same. You move, you shoot, maybe you use a psychic ability, maybe you charge and get into melee combat. When you attack, you roll to hit, and your opponent rolls to save against your successful hits. That's how the games go. In Kill Team, it's 1 miniature at a time doing those things. In Warhammer 40,000, it's a squad of 5 or 10 miniatures at a time.
Broad strokes aside, some minor differences do have a big impact on how the game plays.
In Kill Team, you roll for initiative at the start of each new round. This dictates who acts first in each phase of that round. In the Kill Team first edition, the Movement phase happens in bulk (you move all your miniatures, then your opponent moves) but the Shooting phase alternates (you shoot with 1 miniature, then your opponent shoots, then back to you, and so on). It's a little clunky to have different turn-taking methods, and unsurprisingly the rule got changed for the Kill Team second edition. Regardless of edition, though, the important point is that initiative alternates faster than it does in 40k.
In a Warhammer 40,000 battle, one player dominates a phase until there are no further actions to be done, and then the other player takes a turn. That happens for every phase, whether it's Moving, Shooting, Charging, or Fighting. And the order of operation never changes. You roll initiative once at the start of the game, and that's the order of play until the end.
Warhammer 40,000 has a very active tournament scene. I have some problems with the concept of tournaments but, relevant to choosing a ruleset, the Warhammer tournament scene combined with its normal marketing schedule means that Games Workshop updates 40k almost monthly. Rules get addendums or they change altogether, in-game point values fluctuate which could render your army over or under its build target. The January 2024 rules commentary document effectively adds 20 pages of rules to a ruleset that was only 60 pages to begin with.
What I'm trying to say is that the official rules of Warhammer 40,000 are in a state of constant change. Whether that matters to you or not depends on how you play. For me, it doesn't matter. I bought the core rulebook, and that's what I play.
When I run into an edge case that needs clarification, my opponent and I just make a ruling on the spot. Maybe one day I'll be so confounded that I'll refer to an errata or rules commentary, but I doubt it. Rules changes to a published game essentially don't exist until you look at them. If you play at a game club or a store with lots of other people, then you might have to respect some of the latest changes.
Kill Team has updates and errata too, of course, but not nearly as frequently.
Now, I don't mean to imply that neglect is a feature. When I buy a game that works for me and my gaming group, though, I don't love it when there's a new exception to the rules every time I play. What I really want is a nice self-contained, stable game system that I can play comfortably without the fear of offending an opponent for not knowing about the update document the publisher posted last night. The Kill Team rulebook, whether by design or by niche, is a little more stable than 40k rulebook.
On paper, you need at least "1,000 points" of miniatures to play Warhammer 40,000. A "point" is an arbitrary value that gets defined in army profiles published by Games Workshop, and may change between editions and even during an edition through errata. Generally, it's safe to assume that a 1,000 point army resolves to anywhere from 30 to 60 miniatures. Supposing that each miniature costs 15 money on average, that's 900 money for an army. No matter what your currency, that's a lot of toys in exchange for a lot of money.
Games Workshop offers little workarounds. The popular Combat Patrol boxes are a third of the cost of an army, and using missions provided in the official rulebook (starting on page 212), you can play Warhammer 40,000 at a fraction of the cost. It's still a lot of money and a lot of miniatures.
With Kill Team, you buy a Starter Set or just the rulebook for 100 money and a kit of miniatures for another 100 money, and you're playing a wargame in the Warhammer 40,000 universe for the price of two AAA video games (but getting way more hours of play time out of it).
With more miniatures come more rules, and with more rules come more edge cases. You might find a bunch of things to ponder in a Kill Team game with just 10 miniatures on the board. Imagine that multiplied by 50 in Warhammer 40,000.
Fact is, Kill Team is a physically smaller game, and that means there's less for you to think about.
Speaking of smaller games, Warhammer 40,000 is designed to be big, in the sense of scope. Warhammer 40,000 feels different to Kill Team because you're playing out battles for entire regions of a world, securing an entire city, crushing an entire army. You have tanks and walkers and squads of soldiers. It just feels like a major event.
I don't think any 40k player would deny that managing that many miniatures is a little painful. A game of 40k occurs over the course of 5 rounds because any more rounds would make the game too long to play in one sitting. But that pain is part of what makes the game register as a significant event and a lasting memory. I don't think a game of 40k would feel as epic as it does, were you to make broad generalizations about your army. You could play the game so that every soldier in every unit has the same exact weapon, and with the single stategy of standing in place whilst firing at the enemy. But that's not why we play wargames. Warhammer 40,000 makes your gaming table feel like a war room, and the games you play form memories that stay with you for years.
Kill Team can be just as memorable, but you're not conquering an entire army. You're fighting against enemies whose faces and weapons you see close up, and you remember forever. It's one-on-one combat, or 8-on-8 or 10-on-10, depending on your kill team's size, and it happens within just one space ship or a planetside complex. It's meant to feel small and, in the worst of ways, personal.
It's up to you whether one of those feelings is better or worse than the other. For me, I like both, and that's why I play both army wargames and skirmish wargames.
But suppose you had to choose one over the other. What should you try?
The way I see it, and more importantly the way I play it, is that the rules for Warhammer 40,000 can scale down to Kill Team. In other words, I often play skirmish battles using 40k rules. Put 10 miniatures on the table, ignore detachment rules, play the game. It works a treat, the same way playing skirmishes in Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game works.
Kill Team doesn't scale up to Warhammer 40,000. Its rules are designed for a handful of miniatures and no vehicles.
In other words: if you buy a Kill Team rulebook or starter set, then you have a skirmish game, but not an army game, and if you buy Warhammer 40,000 then you have an army game AND [arguably] a viable skirmish game. Kill Team miniatures, on the other hand, do scale up to Warhammer 40,000. If you buy a kill team this month for Kill Team and then decide to start playing Warhammer 40,000 next month, then your existing kill team could serve as the start of your 40k army (assuming your kill team is compatible with the army you want to play in 40k).
However, the process of scaling up from Kill Team to Warhammer 40,000 isn't inevitable. It could be that you're happy playing skirmish games for the rest of your life, and that you never want to manage an entire army. There are many very good arguments for that. An army takes up more space than a wee kill team, it costs more, it's homogeneous, it's unwieldy.
To state it really plainly, my opinion is:
In the end, Kill Team and Warhammer 40,000 are similar-but-different, and they're both great games. I don't anticipate playing much Kill Team right now myself, in no small part because my Adeptus Arbites kill team doesn't have rules in the first edition (serves me right for not doing research before buying, but then again the book was only $5). And anyway, I'm happy with my 40k skirmish hack and with other skirmish games. Hopefully this post helps somebody make an informed decision.
All images in this post copyright Games Workshop.