Warhammer 40K: Kill Team Datacards Reveal – New Look And New Stats
Games Workshop has reworked Kill Team and the Warhammer 40k skirmish game is getting some new datacards with new stats to match!
Yesterday, we got a handful of teasers about the changes coming to Kill Team and today we’re getting our first real look at those changes – starting with the new datacards. Let’s get in there!
“Instead of directly adapting Warhammer 40,000 rules, datacards present a new collection of stats that capture each combatant’s aptitudes and special skills in greater detail. Oh, and there’s a new movement system too! Let’s take a look at this Hardened Veteran of the Death Korps of Krieg to see what it all means.”
Here we have our first look at the datacards for Kill Team. As you can see, there are lots of new stats as the game has been redesigned from the ground up. Starting off, we have a Move of 3 with a white circle. Uh…what does that mean? Good question:
” To keep everything quick and easy to measure, Kill Team uses a system of four colours with corresponding shapes to represent common distances.”
Couldn’t they have just used inches? Well yes, I think they knew that, too. GW also made this chart to help with those conversions:
“This allows you to easily check your ranges using the combat gauges included in the Kill Team: Octarius box. As operatives are injured or affected by special conditions, their movement values will increase or decrease – this new system makes modifying their characteristics a snap.”
Okay…that sort of makes sense. But I feel like there’s more to this system and how it interacts. But for now, let’s keep it moving and learn what the other stats mean.
The APL is short of Action Point Limit. This new stat helps determine how many actions an operative can attempt in an activation. That’s going to be a big deal as the Kill Team is moving to an alternating activation system. Some of the more powerful units in the game will be able to do more that 2 actions while most humanoids and xenos will have 2 actions to perform per turn. What are some of the actions they can do? We don’t know yet but GW is going to cover those later on – for now, it’s more stats!
Moving on from there, we get a look at the DF, or Defense. This represents the model’s ability to avoid getting hit – be it diving for cover or just their ability to be where the bullets aren’t. Next up we have a couple returning stats – SV is your armor save and Wounds, both of which have changed drastically. Why? Well, your SV only protects vs Ranged attacks now – melee has a whole new system that isn’t covered here. And Wounds have changed in the sense that everyone has more of them to spare. This goes hand-in-hand with the weapon damage changes (which will be covered later) but make it so that your soliders are more likely to get injured vs outright killed before they can act. This should hopefully lead to some more exciting and cinematic moments.
You may have also noticed that there’s room on the datacards for more abilities and unique actions. Above you can see one example with Hardened by War. These are the types of abilities that make your individual models unique from their battle brothers.
And finally, there is also a keyword section with some icons to the right you might have noticed. Those icons classify what those particular operatives are designated as and can impact some of the other abilities in the game and also the narrative side of things as well:
The one stat we’re still not sure about is the GA stat. We’re sure that will also be covered in a later article, too. But for now, that’s a quick look at the new stats from Kill Team. These changes are in preparation for many of the other reworks to the rules coming and we’re curious about how this will all shake out.
What do you think of the rules rework so far? Are you curious for more Kill Team?
