Kill Team: The Three Tank Problem

A Mechanicum excavation gone horribly wrong, a T’au incursion and a complete failure in imperial communications leads to an utter mess of a skirmish over the remains of three destroyed vehicles, each containing valuable information for each faction.

Something verging dangerously close to art has been coming out of the Kill Team league with Dominic’s board setups – this lead to a sidestep away from the Kill Team league with the Three Tank Problem. This was a simple custom scenario devised by Dominic and developed by Aidan and David basically as they were playing.

Three Kill Teams enter the match, each has a vehicle near to their deployment zone that represents their faction. Holding a tank at the end of the round gives you one VP if it’s yours and two VPs if it’s an opponents.

As we didn’t specify any kind of denial on the tanks, this did lead to some rather daft situations like a Blood Raven reiver chasing a scion around a Leman Russ for a couple of turns, but also encouraged some mad plays to try and hold all three tanks. It quickly became apparent that to break a three-way tie, that’s what you needed to do.

Benny Hill music plays throughout.

The game was remarkably close with only a single victory point between Aidan’s T’au that took the win and David’s Scions that jogged into second and another victory point between those Scions and Dominic’s Blood Ravens.

The mission was essentially a tweaked version of Recover Intelligence, but it was an excellent example of how a few tweaks can push Kill Team in interesting directions.

Kill Team continues to prove to be an excellent game and I would strongly encourage anyone who’s on the fence about it to give it a shot!

Some Match highlights

  • A T’au sniper with a rail gun turning the Scion leader into a fine red mist in the second shot of the game.
  • Three guardsmen appearing in T’au enemy lines and managing to somehow survive all of the close-ranged out-in-the-open shooting that followed
  • Blood Ravens mostly failing to chew through the guardsmen
  • A mad dash from the guard to get across the board to hold a tank at the same time as a mad dash from the T’au going in the opposite direction
  • The Blood Ravens’ irrational hatred of grav drones
  • Aidan’s spectacular run of unlikely 6s to hit, followed by equally unlikely 1s to wound. Balance.

10/10 – would play again. Custom scenarios look like they could be a ton of fun, even if (especially if) you break them somehow.