Welcome back, Nobz and Boyz; we’re here to review the new Wrecka Krew, the Orkoid varietal of Astartes-tier threat in Kill Team. While they may not be as flexible as the Astartes in game plans, the Wrecka Krew are the brutal arm of the Ork Kill Teams, offering up better saves, more brutal weapons, and a focus on explosions in comparison to their sneaky Kommando brethren.
Before we dive in, we’d like to thank Games Workshop for providing a preview copy of these rules for Review purposes.
Check out the video review of the team below by Just Another Kill Team Podcast:
Wrecka Krews
Bomb Squigs as explosive activation waster return for the Wrecka Krew, with our two good boys only providing explosive damage and no points for opponents. Meanwhile we’ll have access to five larger boys, and an even larger-er Nob! For some reason Orks get Security and we obviously get Seek and Destroy.
Abilities
Wrecka Rampage
Whenever a friendly operative is shooting, fighting, or retaliating, for each 6 you retain, you gain a Wrecka point in the roll attack dice step. Note that the timing window between landing the 6 and gaining the point means you cannot immediately spend points on the same action where you gained them.
You can spend up to three Wrecka points during any shooting, fighting, or retaliating to retain a failure as a success at a rate of 1:1. You also cannot bank more than six points, or gain any further points if you start an action with six points. Use ’em or lose ’em folks!
Tanked Up
Whenever an engaged operative performs a fight, or an actual shoot action (no sneaky guard actions), add 1 to the operative’s APL until the start of the next activation. Once we get stuck in we’ll stomp around as 3 APL, but if we play sneaky we’re not going to be doing all that much.
The Operatives
Wreckas have a goal and the chassis to get them there. We’ll skip ahead a tad and note that the Extra Armour equipment lets us run slower 5” movement operatives with the juicy 13/15-wound breakpoints, while otherwise we have 12/14-wound orks on a 4+ saves with 6” movement. Generally we’ll hit in melee on 3s, while we shoot on 5s and sometimes 4s. This means we’ll be aiming to land some early Bomb Squigs to build up Wrecka points before our bigger hitters go in through the weakened opposing lines.
Tankbusta Gunner
Our long range generic variants. You get the choice between more accurate ‘Eavy rokkit launcha’ with Heavy(Dash only) hitting on 4s, or Rokkit launchas that hit on 5s without heavy. They both have Blast 1”, and slam targets with 4/5 damage over six attacks, while our melee is pretty paltry with 3 attacks for 3/4 damage. The Kompetitive Steak ability gets us a Wrecka point during selection of a valid target, notably letting us use the point during the retain step of shooting. As long as we’re shooting at a target someone else has already shot at this turn, our gunners will punch up a bit, or farm us a couple of Wrecka points. These operatives don’t seem particularly strong, but it’s hard to argue with six attacks, 4/5 damage ranged profiles. Take ’em sparingly, as we have better specialists.
Breaka Boy Fighter
The melee-centered generic pick, with some sick movement tech enablement. Break Stuff cracks open any 1” thick terrain, and makes it accessible for any operative. On turn 1 crack open some holes and prep your Bomb Squigs to go through a crack, while the fighter’s Smash Hammer smacks people upside the head with 4 attacks on 3s with 5/6 damage and Brutal. You’ll make almost anything you hit wince, and absolutely smush the 10-wound and under opposition. Considering you’ll generally have balanced behind these, they’ll hit hard and turn the movement lanes into swiss cheese which seems tactically advantageous.
Wrecka Boss Nob
14-wounds of pure explosive destruction, with one of two builds. The first is focused on melee with the same Smash Hammer as the fighters, and a singular rokkit pistol with 6 attacks 5s to hit, 4/5 damage, blast 1”, and 8” range. I’ll be honest though I’m building the two rokkit pistols and not looking back. Two rokkit pistols gain Ceaseless and hitting on 4s when focused compared to the singular profile, is a massive upgrade in single target short range fire power, while the Salvo profile lets us target two primary targets on 5s which can farm up a truly absurd number of Wrecka points, or be a glorious finale if you’ve got them stocked up. As the Wrecka Boss when you perform a shoot or fight action, you’ll always gain a Wrecka point which is a nice cherry on top.
Wrecka Bomb Squig
Just as the Kommandos before them, the Wrecka Krew brings along a pair of squigs. The pair looks exactly the same as their Kommando variants, and the Squigs can still potentially survive their own explosives. Their context is different in the sense that these Squigs don’t get Dakka Dakka Dakka, and they’re really here to soften targets. In the process of softening targets you’ll score some Wrecka points, with your 6 attacks on 4s for 4/5 damage, which will let all of your later operatives swing that much harder.
Breakka Boy Demolisha
Boys, meet our best boy, an enterprising ork who’s attached a missile to a stick and called it a Tankhammer. His Reckless Temperament means he takes 1 less normal damage always, and 1 less crit damage while on an engage order. The real crux of our boy here is that he’s meant to charge in, use the less fun bash profile to slam someone for four attacks on 3s for 4/5 damage while using his ability to stay relevant. Otherwise, we slam the Detonate profile immediately which means the missile head explodes for either d6+6 damage on a normal hit, or 2d6+6 damage for a critical hit to each operative in your primary target’s control range. Each operative incapacitated grants you 1 Wrecka point and a smile in the orky afterlife. Considering the average damage of roughly 12-13 damage on a critical detonation, you’re really hoping for the lethal 5+ to pull its weight here. This is our perfect little missile piece, and it threatens to kill off basically everything in the game.
Breakka Boy Krusha
Our less-explosive melee specialist that is no less powerful. Able to use the Smash special rule, to shove opponents into different positions whenever you strike which can maybe shove opponents into mines or other compromising positions. The Armoured Up ability, means that opponents must land actual 6s to hit our Krusha with criticals, in much the same way as tilting shields. The meat and potatoes is our Knucklebustas which are four attacks on 3s for 5/6 damage with Brutal and Shock while Smashing opponents into new positions. The Krusha can hold the line against opposing melee operatives or brutally slam into opposing positions and stay alive long enough for the juicy Amped Up strat ploy heal.
Tankbusta Rokkiteer
The rokkiteer is our lone ranged specialist, with the choice of two limited ranged weapons. The pulsa rokkit drops an AoE token, that your successful hits of your six attacks on 5s empower. For each pulsa point up to four in total, the marker’s effect range is increased by that many inches, then deal D3 damage to each target in range. The Shokkwave effect of the pulsa marker is an injury effect that stacks with operatives actually being injured, which can make the pulsa an amazing tool piece to slow down any choke point. Meanwhile the Rokkit rack is a blast 2”, heavy(reposition only), relentless rokkit attack, with six attacks on 5s. If you combine the rack with Kaboom! Firefight ploy you can get up to blast 3”, which is basically impossible to avoid. Outside of the 1-use profiles the rokkiteer has the 6 attack on 5s 4/5 damage blast 1 profile of the generic variants.
The Ploys
Wrecka Krews come with a pretty standard looking set of orky ploys, with some notable play style influencers. Waaagh! makes its third edition return, granting balanced to melee operatives providing a solid boost in reliability across the team. Tuff Gitz grants engaged operative a re-roll for their defence dice, which is probably useful if you have CP to spare while you’re on engage. Destruction is our ranged ploy which grants Saturate to all ranged weapons, which is useful against softer saves and less so against Astartes. Amped Up is the real star of the show here, letting all engaged operatives heal d3+1 wounds, which means your Wreckas can heal up after the first round of fighting. Taking all your operatives up to 13 wounds with equipment is going to make amped up feel that much more relevant letting you stay alive and in the thick of the action.
Similarly to our strategy ploys, the firefight ploys rhyme with Kommandos with some common through lines. Just a Scratch returns to block a normal hit, and remains very powerful. Demolition Job is used after a fight or shoot action and placed within your target’s control range. Any target within 3” of that demolition marker lets your friendly operatives (excluding the bomb squig) spend a Wrecka point for free, a very powerful ability especially if you’ve got any number of shots lined up. Proppa Scrap lets a breakka boy or nob double fight, simple and powerful, notably this does not work on any ranged operatives! Kaboom! lets us ramp up the explosivity of any Blast weapon with an extra inch of blast AND severe. When combo’d with our gnarly ranged profiles you can catch people off guard quite easily as we only do this when we need to.
Equipment
Drill Rokkits
Once a turn, when shooting a rokkit launcha or ‘eavy rokkit launcha you can switch our blast 1” for piercing 1. If you’ve got harder targets to crack and you’ve got a ranged focused operative on tap these have merit. If your opponent can ignore piercing don’t take these, but it’s useful when you can use it.
Extra Armour
Go from movement 6”, to movement 5” and gain 1 wound for all the Orks. Bomb Squigs don’t get armour. These will be contentious, but the 13-wound break point is massively important against the 4/5 damage chainswords of the Astartes. When you don’t need that extra wound, keep yourself speedy against 7-10 wound operatives, but that armour will see use when you need to survive melee.
Engine Oil
Once a turn, ignore injury for any non-squig operative. Powerful must take, that lets even our injured orks hit hard.
Glyphs
Waaagh! or Destruction ploys are 0 CP on the first use, chosen when you select this equipment. Then as long as you have wrecka points, the ploy continues to cost 0 CP. A must take that saves us CP, and lets us hit the balanced melee button every turn where relevant. It’s hard to imagine a world where you don’t want 3 CP back over the course of the game, so take it and don’t look back.
It’s Raining Bombs and Boyz!
We’ve got to take two generic operatives so we’ll take the Breaka Boy fighters, and a pair of ladders to set up our Turning Point 2 gambits. By using the Break Stuff action on Volkus vantage terrain we can enable our bomb Squigs and Boyz to jump charge off of the Volkus walls without climbing! This means from the vantage point perches our squigs have effectively 6”s of horizontal threat range which often means central objectives are in danger. These initial shock taktics get your Wrecka points up and from there only violence remains.
The team is not meant to hang back and play objectives so play Overrun and send your boys in with reckless abandon where it makes sense. Against teams that out-activate us we’ll creep up on conceal, while staying out of range of our Bomb Squigs. Fighting over the midboard is more sensible when you’re on 5” of movement compared to 6” so adjust accordingly.
How’s the team look?
I’ll not sugarcoat it: As long as the meta remains spooky 14-wound elites that ignore piercing, the Wrecka Krew is in for a rough time, with an especially brutal match up into Nemesis cCaw who stall out your ability to gain bonus APL entirely! Into the smaller-sized teams, the dual track of defensive abilities to heal and shrugging normal damage once a turn means opponents need to put you down entirely which is a tall task, as a low wound ork can climb its way out of injury, or ignore it entirely while healing making them impossible to put down.
The faction looks very direct, which to its credit is something that ork players have not really had a chance to do up til now. I’m looking forward to getting some games into and outside of Legionary, Warp Coven, and Nemesis Claw the team looks quite fun to play.
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