For the final live-streamed reveal of its Warhammer Fest 2023 event, Games Workshop announced Warhammer 40k Kill Team Ashes of Faith – not only a new big box set for its sci-fi skirmish wargame, but “a completely different way of joining in with Kill Team” with a much stronger focus on narrative play, according to GW’s Eddie Eccles. What’s more, the new box is reportedly coming out in Spring, before 40k 10th Edition.
Instead of pitting two balanced teams against one another in a competitive face-off, Kill Team Ashes of Faith’s systems are built for episodic, potentially asymmetric gameplay – following a storyline about agents of the Imperial Inquisition rooting out Chaos cultists.
The box includes two Kill Teams of models: Inquisitorial Agents and Warhammer 40k Chaos cultists – with each side benefiting from game mechanics new to Kill Team. Unlike previous boxes, there is no terrain in the box, and, while the Imperial side gets seven brand new models, their heretical opposition is entirely made up of already-released Chaos cultist sculpts.
Those Imperial Agents models are pretty exciting, however – GW says there’s a huge variety of construction options to build that seven-model team in a lot of different configurations – many of which are directly inspired by the classic Inquisitor game system.
The Chaos Cult team is able to become much more powerful than the Imperials during the course of each game, with ‘devotees’ (basic cultists) able to upgrade to Mutants, and eventually Torments, the longer they’re able to survive.
The servants of the Emperor of Mankind‘s Holy Inquisition, meanwhile, get the ability to adapt to different opponents by ‘allying in’ reinforcements from all kinds of Imperium of Man factions (though not Space Marines) alongside the core of new agent models in the box set.
You’ll be able to either:
- Double up the core Inquisitorial Agents squad from the box, by buying another set separately.
- Add in a set group of “ancillary support” from a variety of other Imperial factions like Astra Militarum.
Crucially, GW also says the cumulative results of early missions will drastically change the power balance (and difficulty) of the final scenario; if the Inquisition don’t complete their objectives in the early stages, the Chaos cultists can become more and more powerful, to the point where the final mission will be “almost impossible” for the Agents to win.
GW also showed off an experimental new range blending Kill Team with the ‘Space Marine Heroes’ blind-buy models, titled Warhammer Heroes.
A set of seven new Primaris and Firstborn Space Marine sculpts sold at random in single, sealed boxes, the twist with the new range is that, if you collect the full set, it forms a complete Kill Team. The rules for that team will be available free online.
Each of the models in the set comes with a helmeted and helmetless construction option, and there’s a mix of specialists from a Primaris Captain through to a firstborn marine. We don’t have a release date or pricing for these just yet, but we’ll report it when we know it.
If you’re not completely au fait with the Adeptus Astartes, best dig into our complete guide to Space Marines – or else widen your focus to all the Warhammer 40k factions you might want to play.
Meanwhile, if you’ve been too busy to keep up with all the Warhammer Fest 2023 news, no problem! Catch up with our coverage of the new Warhammer 40k 10th edition launch box Leviathan, and a rundown of the new Warhammer 40k 10th edition rules we noticed in our playthrough.