In the Warhammer 40,000 universe, the Genestealer Cult is a forbidden religious body of humans that worship aliens. And not just any alien. They worship the evil human-eating, legally-distinct [not] xenomorphs, the Tyranids. At first, I viewed them as a sort of an unexciting mishmash of Chaos Cultists and Tyranids, having none of the chaotic atmosphere of the former and just an occasional smattering of the horror of the latter. But since buying a box of them, I've accidentally fallen in love with the Genestealer Cult. Here are 5 reasons the Genestealer Cult is one of my favourite factions in Warhammer.
One of the most terrifying things about a zombie is that it's a person you know and trust, but in a deranged, irrational, and unrelentingly murderous state of mind. It evokes terror of deception and betrayal, because after all you thought you could trust this person and now you can barely plea for your life before getting your throat ripped out. Chilling stuff, if you take time to imagine it.
The Genestealer Cult is like that, except without the loss of agency. Disagreeable though it may be, a zombie is at least motivated by an animalistic urge. A Genestealer cultist, however, is recruited. A Genestealer cultist makes the conscious decision to betray you, and then lies in wait until the worst possible moment, when you're at your most vulnerable, to do it. And all the while, the cultist has apparently been the same person you've known and trusted and loved.
It's a lot like real life, when someone you know and trust decides to join a religious cult or a particularly abhorrent political party or just harbours a secret agenda while publically denouncing it. Once you discover it, you feel betrayed, but you also feel loss and guilt. You mourn that someone close to you got seduced by the Dark Side without you noticing it or intervening.
That's the Genestealer Cult. It's barely fiction. Replace "alien" with whatever horrifies you in real life, and you don't have to work too hard at imagining a time when this would terrify you. These people do bad things, and are eager for you to die, because frankly you deserve it for not worshipping their Star Saviour.
Worshipping entities that ultimately intend to devour your enemies and you doesn't do anybody any good. That's why a proper death cult is so useful in fiction. They're objectively bad because they aim to destroy not only themselves, but everyone around them as well. It's easy for most people to condemn somebody that promotes mutual but non-consensual annihilation.
That makes the Genestealer Cult a little unique in the moral haze that is the Warhammer 40,000 universe. They're [mostly] objectively evil. I say "mostly" because there's an argument that the Genestealer Cult's overlords, the Tyranids, are living creatures that reproduce, in part, through the Genestealer Cults. Then we're back to a Darwinian fight for survival, but I think it's a fair moral stance to take that you're killing a thing because that thing wants to eat you. That's how nature works, and the Genestealer Cult is just an interesting expression of that struggle.
No matter what faction you play in Warhammer 40,000, you're arguably on moral high ground when you go to battle against a Genestealer Cult. It's tough to say that quite so definitively about any other faction. (Not that you need moral high ground in a fictional universe. It's just a game, you can do what you want.)
Combat Patrol is an amazing game. It's a small (assuming you call an army of over 30 miniatures "small") game of Warhammer 40,000. And I don't mean it's a battle set in the 40k universe, I mean it literally uses the rules of the game Warhammer 40,000. When you play Combat Patrol, you're playing Warhammer 40,000 on a small scale, and all you had to do was purchase one box (um, and the stats, which are stupidly not included, for the miniatures you just bought in the box).
It's a lot easier than trying to wrap your head around how to build an army, what's legally paired with what, how many of a thing you can include in your roster, and so on. You don't have to learn all that stuff. Just buy the box, buy the stat cards, play the game.
And there's a Genestealer Cults Combat Patrol, so this army is ready to play right out of the box (well, a box, and then only after you've assembled the models and painted them, but in wargaming that's the bare minimum).
Combat Patrol is an easy gateway into fullscale Warhammer 40,000 games, if that's what you're looking for. I ended up buying a Combat Patrol box of the Genestealer Cult because Auspex Tactics on Youtube pointed out that it was one of the best buys, meaning you get the most "game points" of models for each dollar you spend. In the Warhammer 40,000 game, you have a budget of points to spend on each soldier you add to your army. Being a big old wargame, it starts at 1000 points, so you look up in a manual or a codex to find out how much a squad of infantry costs, and how much a big truck costs, and so on until you run out of points. You don't have to reach exactly 1000 points, but you can't be over 1000, and you definitely want to spend all your points so you're not bringing half an army to battle against your opponent's full army.
Assuming your aim is a 1000 point army for a full game of **Warhammer 40,000***, then by buying the 2023 Genestealer Cult Combat Patrol box, you have about 70% (695 points) of a valid army. Go buy one Primus and another squad of 5 Aberrants and you've got a complete army. I don't know of an easier army build.
By comparison, in 2023 a Combat Patrol box of Adeptus Mechanicus rendered at best 30% of a 1000 point army (provided you know, and care, to build the models at their optimal point value configurations).
If you're used to D&D lore, then you can kind of think of Genestealer Cults as Yuan-ti. Despite harbouring Tyranid genes, Many Genestealer Cultists look and act human. Minor mutations occur, but they can usually conceal these inconvenient aberrations and still claim to be devout worshippers of the Emperor. In practice, this means any society could be crawling with Genestealer cultists, from the underhives to the peaks of the most important government institutions, and you'd never know.
They exist to spread Tyranid genes across the galaxy, and to stage insurrections against Imperial worlds so the Tyranid hive fleet can take over. In fact, they serve as a beacon for Tyranids. Once a cult has gained enough power on a world, the Tyranid hive detects their power and swarms to the world to consume the world (the cultists included, as with any good death cult).
Genestealers are the baddies in the Angels of Death series on Warhammer TV, and the protagonists in the chilling New Life episode of the Hammer and Bolter anthology series. And of course there are plenty of Black Library books with Genestealer Cults as the antagonist force.
I got through 5 good reasons for loving Genestealer Cults and didn't even mention the advantages the miniatures themselves have in their favour. Like the Traitor Guardsmen from the Blackstone Fortress board game, many of the Genestealer Cultists are pretty generic. They likely fit into most sci fi settings, and maybe your modern setting, too. I can easily see these models appearing in my Fallout board game as raiders, or Space Station Zero, or Majestic 13. Many of them are just angry blokes with guns and sticks. The Magus model could be a good fit for some fantasy settings, depending on your sensibilities. The heavily mutated Genestealers don't look human, so they may or may not fit in as generic bad guys, but they definitely look either alien or mutated, so they fit in with most sci fi settings.
As miniatures go, they're pretty easy to paint. Neophyte Hybrids wear a uniform with some armour, while Acolyte Hybrids and Aberrants wear uniforms that they've shredded while mutating, so you're painting some scraps of cloth and a bunch of Tyranid-style exoskeletal chitin.
Genestealer Cults are easy to overlook, in real life as in fiction. They're not pretty like the Aeldar, they're not edgy like the Drukhari, they're not heavy metal like Chaos Space Marines or flamboyant like those other chaos Space Marines. They're just normal people doing their jobs. While daydreaming of your imminent demise.
Don't overlook them, at your peril.
Traitor guardsmen photo by Seth Kenlon.