Warhammer 40K: Kill Team’s New Line-of-Sight System Looks Intriguing
Orders, Tokens, and Line-of-Sight? Okay, this seems like it could be a change worth investigating deeper. It’s Kill Team time.
You probably know by now that Games Workshop has completely revamped Kill Team from the ground up. We’ve talked a lot about those changes and today we’re taking a closer look at the Kill Team rules for stealth and LoS. There’s also the question on if this could work for a larger scale game like 40k. But before we get there let’s focus on the core mechanic to begin with.
The Firefight phase of the game is when the bullets start flying. This is also when you need to decide how your operatives are going to approach the upcoming phase. Each operative can be in one of two states: Engage or Conceal – and these are based on the order tokens you choose for them:
“Only operatives with an Engage order can take attack actions during their turn, so you’ll need to put your soldiers in the line of fire if you want them to acquire targets. Meanwhile, a Conceal order lets operatives fully hide behind even rudimentary cover”
There are some exceptions to the attack actions based on abilities or weapons, but don’t worry about that for now. The important part is how the models and LoS work based on which mode you’re in.
“The Line of Sight (or LoS) rules are particularly important in Kill Team due to the smaller killzones and densely packed terrain, with eagle-eyed snipers catching mere glimpses of their prey as they flit between cover. They govern who and what a model can see, and therefore shoot at, starting with whether any part of the target operative is visible to the shooter”
If you’ve been playing 40k for years, this is probably going to boggle your mind a bit. There is some abstraction going on here for sure as the initial urge to shoot is strong. “But I can see the model from my attacker’s PoV” isn’t going to be as important. While “True” Line-of-Sight is important, it takes a backseat to which mode the model is in – Engage or Conceal.
You REALLY don’t want to get caught out in the open. That said, with alternating activations, it’s not the worst thing ever to be visible and in the Engage mode. Especially if you have the imitative. That is how you’re going to be able to makes shooting attacks after-all. Oh and don’t forget about raised positions either. Those also let you bypass some of the shooting restrictions, too.
Will It Scale?
If you’ve been around Games Workshop’s games for a while then you might have noticed that GW likes to test rules in one game and then add them to other games. It’s not always a 1:1 move and sometimes the “test” proves that it’s not a good mechanic to port to a different sized game. So let’s talk specifically about these cover/LoS rules and if they could work in 40k. My gut reaction is “no” – and that’s because we’re dealing with individual models vs units.
If one model is hanging out in the open does that make the entire unit a target? Well, 40k, already solves that problem in their core rules so it really doesn’t need to port over the binary Engage/Conceal mechanic on a unit-by-unit basis. And we’re not even going to get into the whole “you can’t shoot if you’re concealed” part as that would hamper a unit’s effectiveness in a larger scale game too much.
However, I do think the tokens could be useful. The fact that you flip them over for activations is a pretty simple and elegant way to track things. And while I think activation tokens are a good idea most players already keep track of their own unit activations as is. This isn’t really a change that’s needed (unless you just need some visual way to track which units have done things in a turn).
So could this cover/LoS idea be modified for 40k? In the current iteration of the game, not really. 40k would need a complete rework of cover and LoS rules for this Kill Team Cover System to be ported over. I don’t think it would work well in a game of 40k scale as it could make things a lot slower. But it does add something unique and different to a skirmish scale game.
What do you think of the Kill Team Cover/LoS system?
