Warhammer 40K: Kill Team – The Perfect Place For Hobby Experiments
Kill Team is a great place to experiment with your hobby skills. Let’s dive into the how and why it works so well.
If you’re a wargamer out there you’ve probably had this feeling before. You’re working on your army and maybe you’re nearing a completion of it or hitting some big milestone for it — hobby wise. But then you see a new miniature or unit and you think “Oh man. I really want to use that — but it doesn’t fit with my army for [insert reason here].”
Kinda want to play them…don’t really want to start a Leagues of Votann army though..
There’s been dozens (if not hundreds) of units over the years where I’ve had that very thing happen to me. And while I probably don’t need more hobby projects on my table, I do think Kill Team can satisfy two things for me as a gamer and hobbyist: New shiny stuff and also a chance to be “done” with a project.
Kill Team As “The Hobby Lab”
To me, Kill Team offers those two checkmarks in my reward center of my brain. The first one is pretty obvious: You get to get new plastic miniatures to build, paint, and play with! That’s one of the reasons I got into this hobby in the first place. It’s a hobby that I can also use to play games with as another part of the hobby. Sweet!
But there’s also the other, less talked about part of the hobby: The sense of accomplishment you get when you finish a project. Look, I’m very guilty of this problem of starting a Hobby project and just not finishing it. For whatever reason. Maybe it was just too ambitious in the first place; the scale was just too much for me. Or maybe once I started on it I realized the price cost was going to be too high. Or maybe I had to pack-up all my hobby stuff and move across the country! Life happens.
However, for me, there’s something very motivating about finishing up a hobby project and checking that “completed” box off in my brain. The funny thing is that it doesn’t matter if how large or small it is. It’s that sense of finality or competition that I really like.
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For example, I recently have been painting a lot of Marvel: Crisis Protocol miniatures. I was chatting with Ben about it and I discovered that I really enjoyed being able to pick-up a single miniature, paint it up, and be “done” with it. I found it to be very motivating. And also encouraging for me. I actively want to go back and do another character. And another and so on.
For me, it was that sense of completion. However, there’s also something about that tipping point where a miniature becomes a unit of 10, which becomes an army of 100s that I really lose my motivation. This can be a serious problem if the units have dozens of paint steps as well.
If you’ve ever batch painted 90 Termagants like I have, you know how rough it can be…
It’s just discouraging when you’re on step 8 of 12 for your squad of 30 and you feel like you haven’t really made any visual progress. “Stick to the process, it will look good in the end” can only work for so long.
So what does this have to do with Kill Teams? Well, for me, 10 miniatures in a Kill Team is just at the right amount of Hobby Project Time that I need. The unit count is low enough that there’s differences between them all (ie, character to the miniature). So I don’t get “bored” looking at the same sculpt a dozen time. Additionally, I can paint 10 of them in a reasonable amount of Hobby Time that I know I can finish them all. And then I get the check box ticked in my brain and I feel good about it.
But I think one other hidden benefit is that I get to experiment with lots of things. From color theory, to painting technique, to just practicing different basing materials — there’s lots to play around with. Maybe you’ve always wanted hot pink Chaos Beastmen who were Slaanesh fans but didn’t want to do a whole army like that. Make a Kill Team and see if you like the look!
That’s the point I’m driving home (other than finding the motivation to keep hobbying). I firmly believe that Kill Team offers a great way to both get that sense of completion for finishing a project AND opens the door to really play around with the painting and modeling aspects of the hobby. It’s a lot less overwhelming to paint up a Kill Team of Aquilion Scions compared to an entire foot-slogging Astra Militarum force. Trust me on that one!
Kill Team: The perfect way to dabble with another army without all the commitment issues!
