Warhammer 40,000: Fireteam Review

Games Workshop is best known for its miniature games, Warhammer 40k and Age of Sigmar. But these present a significant barrier for new players in terms of digesting the rules and assembling an entire army to put on the field. As such, it has long offered shortened introductory versions to appeal to the unwary.

The latest is Warhammer 40,000: Fireteam, in which a melee squad of Space Marines takes on sinister robotic Necrons. However, Fireteam takes a fresh approach by adopting a simplified version of the miniatures rules for what is indisputably a board game. It has cards, a hexagonal grid, and you don’t see a range ruler.

What is in the box

Fireteam doesn’t look like a big deal when the lid is removed. Beneath a double-sided board, each surface printed with an abstract sci-fi battlefield, are a bunch of nondescript orange and white cards of various sizes. It’s when you realize that the box is deeper than the storage tray that the magic happens. Below are three shiny miniature waterers.

You will need tools, time, and ideally some glue to assemble them, but the results are amazing. All five Marine figures are outstanding, energetic, and graceful despite their bulky armor. His thirteen Necron opponents are harder to put together and less flashy to behold, but still detailed and unsettling.

Among the contents of the box are rules and cards for four other squads that do not have models included. They are all factions of the 40k universe: Tau, Eldar, Orks and Imperial Guard and each corresponds to a single model that you can buy separately.

Rules and how to play

Fireteam uses a simplified version of the Kill Team rules, which are themselves a simplified version of the full Warhammer 40k rules. When you activate a model, it gains a certain amount of action points that it can spend to move and shoot. In combat, you choose a weapon and roll its specified number of dice, trying to get its number to hit. The target then rolls their specified number of defense dice, trying to get their armor save number to cancel any hits.

Because this is a board game rather than a miniature game, it can eliminate the often awkward rules required for measured movement. Instead, when you move or check range, you count the hexes. To determine a line of sight, draw a count from the center of a hexagon to the center of the target. It’s clean and fast, just like you would like a shooting game to be.

However, you wouldn’t imagine that such a basic framework would offer many strategies, but Fireteam gets its missions, boards, and cards to do the uprising in this department. There are twelve missions, each of which supposedly represents the turning point in a larger battle. The introductory places teams in opposite corners, seeking to control two target hexes. Things escalate from there to terrain interactions, search and transport missions, and much more.

Each one gives you particular ways to earn points that often have little to do with taking down enemy combatants. As such, it is quite common to see your squad decimated and still win, one of several ideas it has borrowed from its sister title Warhammer Underworlds. Others include its tight three-turn build, which keeps things tense and gives each player a hand of objective cards. These give bonus points for accomplishing particular objectives, like keeping your miniatures spaced across multiple hexagons.

The two included squads are also very different in character. Marines are fast and have an advantage in hand-to-hand combat. Necrons, on the other hand, are lethal at a distance, but they have a special rule that means they cannot perform the same action twice. In practice, this makes them enormously slow, leaving a single model capable of moving six hexes throughout the game. To compensate they have three swarms of fast but weak beetles.

All squads have their own strengths and weaknesses. In addition to combat stats, each one also has three tactics, special abilities of which they can activate one per turn. Those of the Marines focus on combat impulses and reclamation objectives. Meanwhile, Necrons can compensate for their slow speed by warping a single model on the board or by reviving fallen warriors. Making good use of these at the right time can help turn the game in your favor.

Each mission thus becomes a strategic puzzle on how to use the cover, the terrain and the unique qualities of your soldiers to achieve the objectives. For that first objective-based mission, the Necrons must figure out how they can prevent the swift Marines from claiming those objectives on the first turn and gain an unstoppable advantage. Among other issues, this involves coordinating movement in your crowded starting area to ensure heavy robots don’t block each other’s line of sight.

Of course, in a three-turn game where each attack and defense revolves around a handful of dice, “strategy” is perhaps too strong a word. But unless you’re dedicated to the deeper rate, solving each scenario puzzle despite the best efforts of the dice to thwart it offers a nice balance of tension and tactics. Once the best approach to a mission is understood, the dice become more decisive. But the way missions prioritize objectives over deaths tends to shift the balance from combat to strategy.

Although asymmetry is a key part of Fireteam’s appeal, it does lead to some unintuitive rules. Each side can activate eight models per turn, which means that the Marines will end up activating at least one model more than once. A second activation only gets a single action, and you focus all your additional activations on the same model if you wish. While this offers some fun tactical possibilities, it just feels bad to have a single warrior running across the middle of the board and showering fire on the same turn.

There’s another aspect that throws a robotic key at Fireteam’s otherwise smooth gears, which is the sheer number of counters it uses. Models accumulate counters to track wounds, activations, and status effects. Large chip stacks on a crowded board quickly become very difficult to track, losing cohesion over which model owns which stack. And at the end of each turn, you must discover those who are not injured without displacing the others. It’s an awkward and awkward administrative task that excels poorly in such a fast-paced game.

Where to buy

Warhammer 40,000: Fireteam retails for $ 49.99 and is available at select local hobby stores, as well as the national retailers below.