Warhammer is [i]ascendant[/i] at the moment. In the popular spaces of the internet, images of Stormcast Eternals casting down demons in Age of Sigmar, Adeptus Astartes; Space Marines, ripping apart Tyranid Swarms... and maybe if you are paying attention; you see some of the Old World Games Workshops revival of one of its original tabletop wargames that had you field lines of fantasy soldiers and warriors against each other in vast epic battles. Lots of people have heard of GW's Warhammer, more specifically; most people have heard of Warhammer 40,000 or been exposed to it's Gothic aesthetic, 'roided out super human Space Marines or the numerous colorful, cruel and sometimes even mildly comical factions. As most may also know, Warhammer 40,000 (the k is the 1000 kind of k) Is a tabletop wargame and hobby, in which Citadel Miniatures, also owned by GW, sells you inordinately expensive injection molded plastic model kits for you to build, paint and then make little pew pew noises with your mouth as you measure and shuffle them across the board in a ridiculously complicated ballet of rules, tokens, widgets and [url=https://youtu.be/mXPDsE6O31I?si=yNooiw_oyGt4aw-L]arguments over whether or not units have line of sight.[/url]. It is a very, [i]Very[/i] nerdy hobby; the kind that looks monolithic from the outside, impermeable even. Have you ever "considered" getting into Magic: the Gathering, and then gone to game shop with a starter deck and been just absolutely annhilated by a dude with a neck encompassing beard, a massive box of cards they've curated for almost 10 years, and no social skills? Yea I did that... kind of turned me off getting into M:tG... and I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel that exact apprehension when I went in for my first game of Warhammer 40k: Kill Team. Quick Background; there are [i]several[/i] tabletop miniature games set within the Warhammer40k universe, there's Necromunda, a kind of narrative skirmish type game; Blood bowl, sort of a football analogue chess game played with miniatures. There are older more obscure games such as Gorkamorka a sort of predecessor to 40k Orks as a faction Warhammer: Horus Heresy which is narratively set in the year 30,000 10k years early, and of Course the well known Warhammer 40,000 a game of epic battles and epic credit card debt, where you spend hours scraping and painting models just for the privilege of playing an overly complicated tabletop game who's balancin almost 40 years of existing still is totally borked. That's why when someone asks me; [i]"Hey Speaker how do I get into 40k?"[/i] I tell them; "if it's time consuming and expensive hobby you want, buy models. But if you just like the setting, read a few of the books, there's well over a hundred books. Or try picking up a video game if that's your thing." Space Marine 2 was excellent, so was the game Mechanicus. Most video games for WH40k usually boil down to the concept of "This is Xcom, but in 40k!" or "This is Left 4 dead, but 40k flavoured!" I can say confidently that Space Marine 2 doesn't feel like it falls into that Trap, Space Marine feels like a game made for the fans and in homage to the first game which by itself was a cult hit. But I digress, you came here to read how I got into Warhammer. So, One day my roommate on a quiet afternoon showed me a box that her dad have given here... The legend goes; roommates dad bought it thinking; hey! this looks like a fun boardgame! Then proceeded to open it with his wife and discover exactly what he had just bought into... Wife says: "Oh we are so not doing this" give it to Penny (names have been changed to protect the innocent) So they shipped it to her and one day my roommate whips out the Leviathan Starter set with 2 squads of Infernus marines, A Terminator Squad, A Knight Captain, A Psychophage, A Tyranid Prime, 3 Von Ryans Leapers and horde of about 30 Termagants... Literally, 2 starter armies in one box. At the time I didn't even know what we had only that it was usually expensive. [spoiler]The Leviathan Starter Set goes for about 100 USD just looked it up [/spoiler] So we built the Marines and the Termagants totally ignoring all of the huge sprue bits and mold lines we left on them, and never really played but the experience of building them was a good one, due to the starter set being Noob friendly all of the units were snap together, no glue required, although when we went to put the tongue in the psychophage we managed to snap off the fit-together bit. This led to me aquiring tools to do a good job, even though I had totally not paid a cent for any of them I felt bad not making them at least look good for some reason. After spending money on greenstuff to fill in the cracks and gaps on the models i final scraped off the sprue tags and mold lines and primed them. It was the most relaxing thing I've ever done. I was able to hyper focus and fixate on putting paint on the model, and it was great; my mind stopped wandering endlessly in my head, I was working with my hands and I reflected as I painted with a clarity I had not often felt. Fast forward a few months, and I am fully invested In WH40k Kill Team; A smaller-scaled skirmish-based special forces- analogous game mode in the wider 40k franchise whose 3rd edition only just released. (Yes I bought the new box, we'll get to the money later on) and I am absolutely addicted. I have made several close friends at my local game shop, around the world and around my state. And while not all of them are Autistic, a fair few of them show the tell-tale signs of "just a touch of the 'tism" If I wat to play a game of Kill Team and no one is around locally, I boot up Tabletop Simulator and I have a fully modded Kill Team board, models rulers and every objective need necessary to play. I also have a total of 8 Kill teams now. Nemesis Claw (traitor space marines who are like the edgy murdery batman types) Blades of Khaine (Space elf Warrior knights) Hernkyn Jaegirs (Space dwarf Hunter bois in trenchcoats) Brood Brothers ( a Cult of mad max style alien/human hybrids) Veteran Guardsmen (Humans designed to sort of look like scifi German Soldiers from WW1) and my favorite; Kommandoz (Sneaky Green Ork boys- even if they got nerfed in the latest edition... GW took away my Sneaky Git Strategic ploy and I'm still a little sad about it, the annoying part is they only did it so people like me will buy the new elite Ork team when it releases... you should probably see a pattern developing here, but... getting off track again... Point is I have fallen head over heels in love with this game. My first game was sort of a demo game, I got to play with a guy I met while streaming gameplay on twitch, and we became fairly decent friends/aquaintances, it was only later I found out he was one of the top rated Kill team players in the UK, and in the second game I played with him it became quite clear he had gone easy on me the first time around... The second game was my Kommandoz played against his Novitiates, who are a special unit in the Sisters of Battle (nuns with guns, or whips and eviscerator chainswords in this case.) My Orks didn't stand a chance against an experiecenced player with a balanced team, and that [i]HOOKED ME[/i]. Basically how Kill team works is after going through a set of steps to determine things like the terrain, the objectives and the mission, players go back and forth moving 1 unit at a time, (2 in some rare cases, some units have whats called "group activation" meaning when you activate 1 you have to activate another one directly after that) You go back and forth repositioning your friendly models to avoid being shot by the enemy all while trying to achieve whatever objective was decided, sometimes its a matter of taking and holding those objectives until the end of the round called "Turning-Points" named so because they represent an actual turning-point in the battle your models are having... sorry I just relaized thats why they called it that and I love this game more now, You moving your models is not the battle, just the decisive plays that lead to the fight swinging in one players favor. The winner is determined by Victory Points which are gained by completing the critical objectives, killing certain numbers of the enemy team and Tac Ops which serve as like a sort of Secondary objective while the battle is going on, and may range from sacrificing a critical melee hit on an enemy to plant a tracker on them instead, all the way up to declaring one of your units your champion, who gains Victory Points for incapacitating enemies. The game goes back and forth in the turning point until all operatives have been moved when the victory points for the round are tallied. A game of 3rd edition consists of 4 turning points, after which the final score is tallied and the victor is determined. It is possible to achieve Victory and still lose most of your team. It's also possible to get tabled in 2-3 Turning Points if you are inexperienced; Kill Team and 40k is an RNG based game, and as we all know RNGesus can be unforgiving. This highly simplified summary barely scratches the surface, rules like Vantage, line of sight, cover, obscurance, Heavy terrain vs light terrain... It can all be rather overwhelming to a new player. But finiding a good bunch of local game shop buddies made learning it [i]fun[/i] and at the end of the day learning made fun, made me learn things easily. I still can't exactly remember what the Ceasless rule for melee does, I think it means you can re-roll dice results of the same value, like say you roll all ones (RIP) if the weapon is ceaseless you can reroll all values of 1; that's huge. Rending turns hits into crits I think... but thats even a bit shaky. [spoiler][i]continued in comments[/i][/spoiler]