Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team

What is Kill Team

Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team is Games Workshop’s skirmish game for the 40k universe. Instead of an army, you run one small squad of specialist operatives, usually somewhere between six and fourteen models, on a 30 × 22 in board.

Every operative has its own datacard and its own job. A team plays less like a unit of soldiers and more like a cast of characters, and each team has its own rules and tricks.

It’s been its own boxed game since 2018, when the first starter set put the Adeptus Mechanicus up against a Genestealer Cult. A 2021 edition overhauled it, and the current edition arrived in 2024.

The current edition (2024)

The edition launched with Kill Team: Hivestorm, which went up for pre-order on 21 September 2024. The box has:

22 multi-part miniatures in two new kill teams, the Tempestus Aquilons and the Vespid Stingwings
terrain for Killzone: Volkus, a ruined city with tall walls and places to climb
a Core Book and the Hivestorm Dossier
a double-sided game board, dice, and token sheets

The Core Book is also sold on its own. It covers three killzones (Volkus, Gallowdark, and Bheta-Decima) and a mission pack called Joint Ops, where players team up against enemy operatives the game controls.

On 2 October 2024, Games Workshop put out a free Kill Team app on iOS and Android. It has the Kill Team Lite Rules and every team’s rules, 33 teams at launch. Games Workshop calls it “designed purely as a rules reference tool.” Team rules are also free to download from Warhammer Community, so you don’t need to buy datacard packs.

What’s next: Kill Team: Armageddon

Games Workshop revealed the next big box at the Big Autumn Preview on 18 September 2026. Kill Team: Armageddon pits the Legion of the Damned against an Ork Nobz Mob, with Killzone: Armageddon terrain (two bunkers, ruins, a wrecked Redemptor Dreadnought and a Rogal Dorn Battle Tank), datacards, and a dossier with both teams’ rules. As of this writing there’s no price or release date.

How it plays

Four turns. A game lasts four Turning Points, each with a Strategy phase and a Firefight phase.
Alternating activations. Players take turns activating one operative at a time. An operative gets a number of actions equal to its APL: move, charge, shoot, fight, grab an objective.
Engage or Conceal. Every activation, you give the operative an order. Engaged operatives act normally. Concealed ones can’t shoot or charge, but they can’t be targeted while they’re in cover.
Terrain matters a lot. Shooting at an obscured target throws away one of your hits and turns crits into normal hits. Cover lets the defender keep a save automatically.
Three defence dice. Every save roll uses three dice, and 6s are critical saves.
Melee is a trade. Both fighters roll, then take turns spending their hits on damage or on blocking the other’s hits. There’s no saving throw in a fight.
Injured operatives slow down. Below half wounds, an operative loses 2” of movement and gets worse at hitting.

Goonhammer’s review puts a game at under an hour.

How to start

Get the Starter Set. It has two seven-model teams (Space Marine Angels of Death and Death Guard Plague Marines), a 64-page Starter Handbook with tutorials and scenarios, slot-together MDF terrain, a double-sided game board, tokens, and dice.
Download the app. The free Kill Team app has the Lite Rules and every team’s rules.
Pick a team you like the look of. Every team’s rules are free, so buy models, not books.
Want the full game? Hivestorm or the Core Book gets you the complete rules, more killzones, and Joint Ops.
Check your local store. When I went back to my old Games Workshop this year, they had a Kill Team game set up on one of the tables (GW got me again).