Mountainside Tabletop take on the Red Terror

Kill Team: Terror on Devlan is available for pre-order from Saturday, and there’s loads of awesome new rules to get our teeth into. We asked our friends at Mountainside Tabletop to give us the lowdown on the boxed set.

Mountainside Tabletop: Kill Team: Terror On Devlan is an exciting prospect for us! A Joint Ops-focused, narrative-fuelled combination of some classic Kill Team tricks and mechanics with a massive, red, slithering twist.

The story

Welcome to Devlan, a remote Imperial mining world. After receiving bits and pieces of information from an assortment of vessels fleeing an unknown threat, it is determined that Devlan must be evacuated. The Devlanites' crucial error comes when they are confronted by a worrying apparition. A ship, the Solace of Silence, drops out of the Warp too close to the planet. After some frantic communications telling of xenos swarms aboard the ship, it is decided that the vessel will be shot down and destroyed. Two days after the wreckage lands on Devlan, the mysterious and gruesome attacks begin. An assortment of Tyranid bioforms have crashed down planetside among the debris – including the serpentine nightmare that would eventually be known as the Red Terror.*

Since Devlan is largely a mining world, and has somehow never been part of a war, the local garrison isn’t up to the unique challenge of a singular menace like the Red Terror. As a last resort, a Spectre Squad by the name of call sign Jester is deployed to handle the Tyranid menace. With notches on their belts from Ork walkers, Drukhari raids, and Aeldari Wraithguard, they are the best option at hand to deal with this new crisis. As you’d expect, the Cadian veterans stalk their target and launch their assault, but it’s unclear if call sign Jester is the predator or the prey. The fight culminates in a heroic last stand by the Spectre Squad, all the while knowing that they are the only line of defence between the Red Terror and the throngs of panicking humans desperately trying to escape their doomed world…

The rules

Joint Ops: Terror On Devlan mission pack

This box features a new narrative mission pack, featuring nine PvE missions that can be played using either cooperative or solo gameplay. All of them involve the Red Terror and a handful of its Termagants and Ripper Swarm friends. While you can randomly select one and hop into a game, where this pack really shines is the campaign. Starting with Mission 01: The Hunt Begins, whether or not you win or lose determines your next step along the campaign path. It gets really exciting after the fourth mission, where the paths start to aggressively diverge and set you on the way to the different outcomes, ranging from Glorious Campaign Victory, all the way down to a Spirited Campaign Defeat. As always with Joint Ops, you can tweak the number of NPOs or the number of wounds they start with to increase the difficulty as necessary. 

One interesting mechanic is the NPO activation cards, which come in a deck of 13. Whenever an NPO activates, draw a card, and the table in each mission description will tell you what to do. I love this because it could get really swingy (think multiple Red Terror activations in a row), but also because it takes some of the decision-making out of the players' hands. In the past, it has sometimes been hard to make all of the decisions for the NPOs. This will help alleviate some of that and move the game along faster, with more randomness. Another nice touch is that you can easily substitute this deck with a standard set of playing cards, using all the cards from one suit. All you really need is 13 numbered cards!

When I play this campaign, I hope I lose the right combination of games to end up at Mission 09: Last Stand. Without spoiling too much, the battle will only end once your team is completely incapacitated, and “winning” is calculated by how long you can survive. As it says on the page, “The deeds of your kill team will not be remembered” – how grimdark is that?!

The Red Terror

As you would expect, the Red Terror is an absolute menace on the table. It’s got a 4+ save, 30 wounds, and deals a TON of damage. It has two datacards, Hunt and Lurk – with each one having different behaviour. The real kicker is that it’s never really incapacitated. Any time it reaches zero wounds, it gets them all back and will either switch behaviour or get a Regeneration token. Either way, plan to make hay while you can because it’ll be back on the table, ripping up your team very quickly.

The other Tyranids

Obviously, the Red Terror is the main course here, but the other NPO datacards for Termagants and Ripper Swarms are an excellent appetiser. The latter features 5 attacks in melee paired with 10 wounds. Sounds like a pretty annoying problem for an unlucky gunner to get stuck in combat with! You can’t spell “Ripper Swarm” without ‘parriers’ after all…

Spectre Squad

The Spectre Squad kill team represents the epitome of flexible control. Thanks to their Elite Fieldcraft rule, you’ll be able to respond to any threat on the board, and set up some pretty nasty traps for your opponents to fall into. They won’t win games with raw stat line power, but if you can saturate the board with enough threats, and plan your escape routes wisely, they’ll be hard to rule out of any fight.

Elite Fieldcraft is their signature faction rule. It allows them to interrupt enemy activations twice per turning point. These interruptions will allow them to incapacitate a threat, escape to safety, or otherwise hamper their opponent’s plans. They also come with Camo Cloaks to beef up an otherwise pretty meagre defensive profile.

The Spectre Vox-Relay Beacon looks like a lot of fun. It can hand out an extra APL to a friendly operative within 6”, but can’t ever move. However, it can be set up anywhere in your territory (following the usual rules), so make sure to put some thought into where you want to have the option for some extra action economy later in the game.

Other than a pretty tricksy faction rule, this team functions exactly how you would expect it to. Lots of fun tools, but not ones you’d want to take into hand-to-hand combat! Honourable mention to the Sniper Overwatch equipment, which gives you a once per turning point shot with a Devastating 2 weapon. Paired with the Elite Fieldcraft interrupt, it could be a pretty nasty surprise for a charging enemy. 

Final thoughts

Overall, more than anything with this box, I can’t wait to play through the Joint Ops missions. I’ll play it once with the Spectre Squad, but my mind is already racing with the possibilities of pitting some of my other teams against the Red Terror and its gang. 

Thanks, folks! We’ll be taking a closer look at how the Red Terror works later in the week. In the meantime, select your kill team to take on this monstrous Tyranid bioform.

* The Red Terror’s destructive conquest of Devlan took place during the Imperium’s early encounters with the Tyranids.