The new Typhon expansion contains a bit more stuff than we’re used to. It includes two sprues of Tyranid terrain and a sprue of Hormagaunts to use as Non-Player Operatives (NPOs). That pushes up the price a bit — so is it worth it, and is solo and co-op Kill Team something people want? I sent my Ratlings on the new Joint Operations missions to find out.
Thanks to Games Workshop for giving us Typhon to play with.
Table of Contents
Terrain
There are two identical sprues in the box, from which you can build a bit of Tyranid terrain. There’s quite an assortment of big claws, egg sacs, brood nests and other weirdness. Two of the big claws, one from each sprue, are designed to be stuck together and optionally stuck on top of one of the nests to make a big spiky thing.
It all goes together very quickly, with some parts not requiring any assembly. I painted my set up pretty quickly using a variety of weird contrast colours and blending the ruins on the base to match the Volkus game board. Here’s how it looks on Volkus with some figures.
Functionally it’s a bunch of different-looking scatter terrain. It’s mostly counted as Light, but the big spiky pieces are Heavy.
NPOs
You get a sprue of Hormagaunts and a Ripper Swarm to use as NPOs. I painted mine up very quickly with just a few contrast colours, with a result that’s perfectly good enough for this job. The box also has rules for Termagents, Barbgaunts, Von Ryan’s Leapers and Raveners. Most of these can be found in some of the 40k starter sets so you may already own them. Of course the new Ravener kill team is in the box too and available, unless you’re playing as them.
Joint Ops
Having painted up the terrain from the Typhon box I thought I’d have a go at the joint op missions, using a Ratling team that I’ve recently finished. I thought Ratlings would be pretty bad at this kind of thing and in my over-confidence I thought that would help make the missions a challenge.
For the first mission, which involves planting drones in nests while trying to avoid alerting sentries, I just used the Hormagaunts out of the box. The random event cards in Typhon added quite a bit of randomness, in a good way. I felt quite in control sneaking up at first but in tp2 a new Hormagaunt spawned and they all dashed towards me, meaning they activated. I had to kill them before they jumped my poor Ratlings but that set the alarm off, so suddenly there were 10 active Hormagaunts instead of 4 sleeping.
Fortunately, those Hormagaunts mostly bounced off my Bullgryns, allowing me to succeed without too much difficulty. You have to get all over the board for this mission so the free Ratling dashes helped, as did the battlemutt’s early warning. I don’t usually take the Hardbit but he killed two Hormagaunts in melee and the Sneak got the job done, planting the fourth beacon.
Mission two required me to kill two gestation sacs, which were inside strongholds out of sight, each spawning D3+1 NPOs per turn. I decided to switch things up and add in the random NPOs that Typhon gives you stats for, proxying in some stuff for the models I don’t have.
This turned out to be too much of an ask for my poor Ratlings. Where Hormagaunts couldn’t deal with the big guys, Von Ryan’s Leapers took big chunks out of them. A Barbgaunt also spawned and shot a couple of my guys, Killing my Bombardier before he could do anything. Some bad dice rolling didn’t help, and I called it with just my Fixer and Big Shot alive on top of a ruin, facing down a tide of Tyranids.
It was annoying to lose, and I am cursing my Ogryn for failing to roll a 3+ on 6 dice when he got charged by a 1hp Leaper. It was also great though that they’ve put the challenge level of these missions high enough that you easily can lose them. Since I had the board set up I tried it again with Angels of Death and they managed to succeed fairly easily, helped a lot by being able to drop frag grenades into the strongholds while they were full of Gaunts.
As I’d lost game two, the third scenario was “Desperate Sacrifice”. One of my operatives had to carry a really big bomb to a hive node, personally. I’d learned from the second mission that the way to kill lots of bugs in a stronghold is with big blast weapons so I brought a couple of Bullgryns with rockets. This worked well and I managed to keep the enemy numbers under control. An uncomprehending Bullgryn carried the big bomb down the tunnel and everyone else ran for it.
Overall the campaign was fun and useful practice at running the ratling team. I find them a bit high brain load with all the activations and free dashes to worry about, so it was nice to run them a few times without inflicting my analysis paralysis on a human opponent. I think I’ll probably play some of these scenarios again to practice with other teams.
Adversary Ops
This is a set of missions using the Tyranid terrain and some NPOs, while the players fight out a normal mission, such as the Approved Ops ones. This just gives you a dormant Hormagaunt guarding every objective, that wakes up if you go close to it. The NPOs always have their activation after the two players and attack whoever is nearest. You probably want to just use the same type of NPO for all three objectives to be fair, though you can randomise it.
Players and TOs might choose to use these as new maps for organised play sometimes, perhaps minus the NPOs. Adding a bit of variety to Volkus is no bad thing.
Final Thoughts
I wasn’t sure if Typhon would be worth the added cost of the Hormagaunts for people who aren’t going to do joint ops much. Having tried it I think it probably is if you have a killzone, and ideally Volkus, to use it with. Having these solo/co-op missions available is a useful way to try out a new team and a nice way to introduce new people. I can see people who run clubs using it quite a bit. I’ve ordered some other Tyranids so I’ll have the proper models for all my NPOS – which was probably Games Workshop’s plan all along.
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