Warhammer 40,000 Kill Team 3rd Edition will be released in October

After weeks of announcements, Games Workshop has unveiled a new edition of its competitive skirmish wargame Warhammer 40k: Kill Team. The new edition will be available initially in the Hivestorm box set, available for pre-order in September and due for release in October. It includes new models for elite Militarum Tempestus Aquilons and alien Vespid Stingwings, and rules for all factions will be available for free online at launch.

GW revealed the new edition of Warhammer 40k Kill Team during a special livestream on Saturday. Teasers this week have tipped the community off to expect a new season of Kill Team, featuring models for two Warhammer 40k factions—we're betting Elysian Drop Troops will be one of them—but the announcement of a new edition comes as quite a surprise.

The Hivestorm box set is set on the world of Volkus in the vastness of Chalnath, a region currently fought over by the Imperium of Man, the T'au Empire, and the Orks, with factions sending landing forces to fight for control of a single, insanely large weapon.

Rule changes for Warhammer 40k Kill Team 3rd Edition

Warhammer 40,000 lead writer Wade Pryce and Kill Team designer Elliot (no last name given) revealed all about the new, third edition in a video interview. We've summed up the key points, or you can watch the whole thing below:

The rules for all existing factions will be made available online for free when the new edition is released. Elliot says this will be a source of living rules, making it easier to update them with corrections or balance patches, and will eliminate the need for players to purchase books to get their faction rules.

This is the first time Games Workshop has made the full rules available for free for a game that is still supported with model releases. It's years behind most other wargame makers, but still very welcome.

The rules for Kill Team Third Edition will be very similar to the current version, save for “targeted improvements.” It seems that an emphasis has been placed on making these rules more accessible to new players. The core rules have been reworded to be clearer, while a separate “Key Principles” section aims to provide definitive answers for edge cases and competitive decisions.

The new rules introduce universal equipment available to every faction, including a range of deployable scenery, a set of which will be included in the Hivestorm boxed set.

By bringing killing back into the Kill Team, missions now feature a Kill Op that awards victory points for causing casualties.

The game includes rules for both solo and co-op play. A variation of this concept can actually be found in the recently released board game Darktide, a co-op dungeon crawler that uses the Kill Team rules engine. Elliot says that not only is it fun for players who enjoy co-op and solo war games, but it's also a worthwhile way for veterans to introduce new players to the game.

Taking a look at the contents of the Kill Team: Hivestorm box set, the updated measuring ruler tells us that the movement bands in the game remain the same as they always were, with one big difference. The system of marking each distance with a shape is gone. Thank the Emperor – it was terribly confusing.

Contents of the Kill Team Hivestorm box set

The new Warhammer 40k Kill Team: Hivestorm boxed set contains 22 models, terrain, core rules, useful tokens, matching playing cards, dice and measuring tools. The complete contents of the box set are:

• Vespid Stingwings Kill Team, 11 models.
• Tempestus Aquilon's Kill Team, 11 models.
• 14 pieces of urban ruins scenery for Kill Zone Volkus.
• Hivestorm dossier with information on the War for Volkus, unique missions, and complete rules for both Kill Teams.
• The Upgrade Equipment Pack, which includes measuring tools and placeable terrain such as barbed wire and assault ladders that any faction can purchase as mission equipment.
• Approved operation cards, a full set of mission cards, tactical operations and matched play cards.
• Dice.
• General Kill Team Tokens.
• Tokens for the Vespids and Aquilons.

Existing players who don't want the entire boxed set can buy the new core rules as a separate hardback. There will be support for existing terrain collections: the Approved Operations cards include booklets with two terrain layouts for each of the Kill Zones released in the second edition.

The narrative missions in the Hivestorm Dossier focus on asymmetric drop attacks, with one player defending a position and the other engaging from above. This is not limited to the two factions in the box set, so if you have a team of Space Marines Scouts or Sisters of Battle Novitiates, you can still throw them into battle. The Hivestorm Dossier is not sold separately.

Kill Teams in the Hivestorm box set

Two new Kill Teams make their debut in the Hivestorm box set: the Tempestus Aquilons and the Vespid Stingwings.

Tempestus Aquilons Killteam

Tempestus Aquilon are specially trained Tempestus Scions with a particular focus on air missions and with lightweight, stripped-down versions of Tempestus' standard weapons.

The Scions are the elite special forces of the Astra Militarum. They are all recruited from the Schola Progenium, orphanages that care for the children of those killed in the Emperor's wars, and are raised with the utmost discipline. The Aquilons are no more elite, but they are specialized in their role.

In Kill Team, the Aquilons have the option to keep part of their team in reserve and deploy them during the mission. Their drop zone is represented by markers that can gradually move forward during the mission and lock on to a target.

Vespid Stingwings Killteam

Vespid Stingwings are one of the many alien species that fight as auxiliaries in the armies of the T'au Empire. They are a species of insect and descended from a gas giant that supplies unique crystals that power their weapons.

Vespids are armed with neutron blaster weapons that draw their power from the harmonic resonance between the crystals and the vibration of the Vespid wings. Vespids are extremely aggressive – there is a rumor that the communion helmet worn by their unit leader is actually a T'au mind control device.

In Kill Team, they are lightly armored and highly maneuverable, with their weapons becoming more powerful as they move before firing, reflecting their crystal harmonics. When playing them, you have a limited pool of Communion points, which affects how many actions you can perform that aren't simply advancing and attacking, which is the equivalent of a T'au leader “suggesting” tactics to his instinctive charges.

Kill Team is very successful as a competitively balanced skirmish game, but its strong core rules are lost in a sometimes obscure rulebook, and the current metering tool is also a crime against tabletop game art design. If the new edition just fixes the metering tool and removes some of the obfuscation from the rulebook, it will be a sure success.

Fans of skirmish games who want something as tightly written as Kill Team but a little less intense can check out our preview of Fallout: Factions. It's a loose game from the designer of 2017's Necromunda that we really like – so check out our review here.