Games Workshop announces new edition of Kill Team, kills off shapes

In not particularly shocking news, Games Workshop has announced that Kill Team is getting an all-new edition this year. It’ll be new rules, a new world, and those old shapes you hated? They are dead.

Now, thankfully, Games Workshop has not launched a full-scale war on geometry in general, just the rather odd shapes system that they used for measurements in the current (last?) edition of Kill Team. You could move or shoot Triangle, or Circle. It made no sense when good old-fashioned inches were right there.

While Games Workshop hasn’t gone into any major details on new rules, or even mentioned the fact that shapes are gone, I very cleverly used my eyes to look at an image they posted where you can clearly see measuring tools with inches instead of shapes. Thus, my amazing deductive powers had all the clues they needed to ascertain what was happening.

This time, the story plays out on a world called Volkus, where valiant Tempestus will be trying to save the world from invading Xenos. The boxed set will pitch Tempestus Aquilons against Vespid Stingwings, with a heavy theme around flying. Even the terrain plays into this, as the announcement article states that “Many of the ruins are multi-leveled structures, giving the airborne Aquilons and Stingwings plenty of places to exercise their skills in the skies.”

Apparenlty, the rule book has gotten a top-to-bottom rework and rewording to make things clearer and easier, with the aim being to make it easier than ever to get into. This has been GW’s big push lately, with both Warhammer 40K, Age of Sigmar, and now the smaller-focused skirmish game Kill Team all being made a little more user-friendly. The issue is, frankly, that this has not always been a success.

I do like Kill Team, although if I am honest, I miss the more malleable first edition and am more likely to fire that one up these days than to play the current version. It will be interesting to see how the next edition plays and if it can drag me back into the fold and away from the never-ending appeal of the dark, more tumultuous edges of the miniature game design space (hello, Trench Crusade, my beloved).

For anyone worried about what this means for your current teams, Datacards are incoming with relevant changes and new rules, although there are no details yet if free versions will be made available in glorious PDF format. I shall be keeping a close eye on things and will send reports from the front lines as I see more activity around the various manufactorums of Games Workshop.