Games Workshop - Kill Team: Octarius (2021 Starter Set)

Product Information

Even once I had it done as according to the guide, and after some fiddling, the support column still wasn’t quite touching the ground.

The Kill Team: Octarius War Manual provides specific rules and background to the two factions included in the Octarius box. Strategic Ploys are army unique and give you some cool bonuses – for example adding 1 to save rolls for that turn. The player with initiative in the first turn is usually determined by the mission you are playing, but from the second Turning Point onwards each player rolls off with the winner being able to decide who has Initiative – in the case of ties this goes to the player who did not have initiative last time. GW’s decision not to include a sheaf of handy datacards for each of the Kommando and Krieg operators (as it did with Dominion, and, significantly, Warcry’s original starter set) feels like a disappointing missed opportunity to bring people into Octarius’ gameplay quicker and easier.

The Compendium contains lists of Fire Teams that you can pick from when composing your Kill Team – and thus, here begin the issues. The 40k concept of overwatch on a charging unit doesn’t exist, this is more so your operatives managing to get off an inaccurate reactive shot in response to an enemy action. Rather than watered down 40k, Kill Team now feels very much like it’s own entity – a distinct game with different mechanics and a more detailed way of playing skirmish battles. What’s more, this launch will be followed up by major releases every quarter, including new models, killzones, and settings, and you may even see detailed rules for other factions elsewhere.

What few predicted was a full-on redesign and relaunch, with brand new rules (clearly inspired by Age of Sigmar’s parallel spin-off Warcry) and a massive, crowd-pleasing limited-edition box set to ring in the ‘new edition’. However, these are both very thin and often at odd angles, which can make it even more difficult to judge where they’re supposed to go. Octarius comes with two books: the Core Book and the Octarius Book (well, three if you count the build guide for the Orks, DKoK, and scenery). Next up we have the Plastic Ork Kommandos, and again these are absolutely dripping with character – Sadly my frantic week of painting and review writing didn’t leave me enough time to finish these guys before the article had to go live, I did manage to build them up to show what they look like assembled!And, when time came to play, actually getting up to an engrossing pace proved quite difficult – partly because the Core Book could be a mite clearer about a couple of key rules (more on that shortly), but mostly because I spent so much game time flipping between pages in the Octarius supplement booklet, looking up the stats for different operatives as they came up. The rules themselves are mostly easy to grasp, and well laid out, though afflicted at times with the over-worded, competitive-balance-minded legalese of all modern GW rules.