Kill Team battle report: Blood Angels vs. Tyranids

Reagan and I got together on July 7th for our second match, Tyranids (him) vs. Blood Angels (me) playing the Secure Archaeotech mission.

I’m not sure I have the stamina to post a battle report for every game I play, but as long as I do and it’s fun I’m going to keep doing it. It’s just so damned exciting actually seeing my little war mans running around and getting played with!

The ‘nids are the first team I’ve painted up explicitly for Kill Team, so for now they only come in one version: 3 Tyranid Warriors (venom cannon plus melee, weaponbeast, and deathspitter/melee) and 4 Genestealers (2 scything/rending, 3 double rending).

This was my second outing with my Blood Angels, and I’d fought against them once, so I knew what I wanted: Bolter Discipline. My plan was to buy that ploy every single turn, so I had my leader with a bolter, 1 heavy bolter guy, 3 grunts with bolters, and 1 plasma gunner. (In hindsight, against a team where 5/8 have an invulnerable save, I should just have foregone plasma for a sixth bolter.)

I put something like 25-30 hours into reworking my Genestealers and painting up the Warriors so they’d be ready for today. Having an upcoming match on the calendar is a great painting motivator!

For the entire first Turning Point, I felt like I was living Aliens. I’d built the Tyranid team, so I had a good idea how fearsome they were. Six dudes against eight of these multi-limbed monstrosities felt like it could only go one way (badly for the six dudes).

Reagan held me, if memory serves, one dead Genestealer and nearly zero shots on his entire team, and I don’t think I got a single overwatch shot. This felt like a perfect first turn for the bugs, and it was super frustrating to play against (in a fun way!).

I adore the way base size matters in Kill Team. I figured the Tyranids — on 50 mm bases — would be easy to shoot, but maybe also have good lines of sight for shooting because their heads were so high.

What hadn’t considered, and what Reagan immediately figured out, was that it’s really easy to keep a model on a 50 mm base with a conceal order in cover, denying the shooty red lads all their shooty.

My die rolls were consistently good, while a surprising number of Reagan’s rolls really stank. If he hadn’t been rolling cold, this could easily have turned into a win for the bugs.

Pretty much every time a bug got into melee, a Marine got deleted. I stood off as best I could, and in hindsight (as in I’m realizing it right now, as I write this post!) those early activations when I couldn’t shoot much weren’t such a bad thing. They set me up for a pivotal turn two, when advancing on my dudes meant getting shot a whole bunch.

Kill Team is really hitting every mark for me, and it’s a 9/10 game well on its way to being a 10/10.