Phil and I had a chance last night to both kick the tyres on a new Kill Team extension for VASSAL 40k I’ve been working on and to improve our understanding of the rules. I’m glad to say the extension did everything it needed to do. The players, however, need to brush up on the rules. Here are a few things we got wrong…

Grenades – only one model in your Kill Team can throw a grenade per phase. (P.30)

Injury Rolls – there are a few things we got wrong here:

  • Each flesh wound adds +1 to subsequent Injury Rolls
  • When a model is reduced to 0 wounds by an attack from a Damage 1 weapon the controlling player makes the Injury Roll. (P.32) I got this wrong. P.31 indicates it is the attacking player that makes the roll. The term controlling player is used a little confusingly on P.32 as they had just referred to the target model…
  • When a model is reduced to 0 wounds by an attack from a multi-Damage weapon (2, 3, D6 etc.) the attacking player makes a number of injury rolls equal to the amount of damage caused by the attack, choosing the highest. (P.32)

The above has an interesting implication for re-rolls, i.e. the player actually making the rolls can decide if they want to use a Tactical Re-Roll (1 CP) to re-roll dice. Nope, no interesting implication…

Morale Phase – in a pretty elegant ruleset this is the (moderately) ugly part! Here are the things to know:

  • Flesh wounded models suffer +1 to their Nerve test per flesh wound.
  • The order in which you take individual model Nerve Tests matters as each model that fails becomes broken; broken models add +1 to subsequent tests by other models. This can lead to a cascading effect.
  • Get a 2″ gauge! Each non-shaken friend within 2″ of the model testing contribute -1 to the test.

Let’s imagine this situation (the Orks have three out of action models)…

The Ork (Ld 6) with the aura is about the take a Nerve Test as he has a flesh wound. The test is taken on a single D6 with more than 6 being a failure resulting in the Ork becoming Shaken. What does Shaken mean? He won’t get to act at all in the next turn! Let’s look at the modifiers to the roll: +3 for the out of action friends, +1 for his own flesh wound (indicated by the ‘F’) and -3 for three non-shaken friends within 2″. So, a cumulative +1. He’ll be okay on anything other than a 6.

It may make sense to start with someone else. The Burna Boy on the right of the combat, for example, is in a similar situation, but has more non-shaken friends nearby. He’d probably automatically pass in this situation and is a better model to start with. If however, the top Ork had gone first and rolled the bad 6 he’d now contributing a +1 to anyone else’s Nerve Test roll!

That’s a long way of saying the order in which Nerve Tests are taken matters!

VASSAL Extension – on the module front since the screenshots here were taken I’ve increased the contrast on the terrain and fading the battleboard a little. I’ve also added Sector Munitorum and Sector Mechanicus boards. I hope to release the extension soon. The terrain in the image above is from another extension (by u/capturethebag).

Until next time,

Owen