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How to run a Kill Team league

A Kill Team league is a group of players who agree to play each other over a few weeks or months, with a table that keeps score and usually a final at the end. It suits Kill Team well: games are short, a team is a handful of models, and a league gives people a reason to finish painting the one they bought at launch.

This guide covers the decisions that make a league work, most of which apply whatever you use to run it. Where Pairings Up does a step for you, it says so. Running 40k instead? See How to run a Warhammer 40k league.

League or tournament?

A tournament is one day, one room, and a winner by the evening. A league is spread out: games happen whenever the two players can meet, and the point is the season as much as the champion. If your players can't all make the same night, you want a league. The longer version is on Best Coast Pairings alternatives.

Five decisions to make before anyone plays

1. How many players. Any number works. A first league of eight to twelve is easy to keep track of and still gives everyone a fresh opponent most rounds. With an odd number, one player sits out each round with a bye, and the byes should rotate so nobody gets two while someone else gets none.
2. How long. That's the number of rounds times how long each round stays open. Two weeks a round is forgiving: long enough to find a time with a busy opponent, short enough that the league doesn't drift. The CT Crucible's second season, for example, ran six rounds over twelve weeks.
3. How people get paired. There are two common ways, and they suit different leagues.
   The whole schedule up front

   Every round is drawn before the league starts. Everyone knows who they owe a game to, and two players who are both free can play a later round early. Nobody has to wait on the organizer between rounds.

   Pair each round by record

   Winners play winners, round by round (Swiss). It sorts the strong players to the top quickly, but every round waits on the last one finishing, and the organizer has to pair it by hand each time.

   Whichever you pick, avoid rematches until everyone has played everyone new.
4. How a game is scored. The usual way is league points for the result (3 for a win, 1 for a draw, 0 for a loss) and victory points to break ties, so a big win counts for more than a narrow one. A Kill Team score splits into Crit Ops, Kill Ops and Tac Ops, and it's worth recording that split: it tells you later how games were actually won.
5. How it ends. Most leagues finish with a short knockout between the top of the table: top four or top eight, seeded by final position, so first plays fourth and second plays third. Decide now whether the champion is the finals winner or the player top of the table, and say so in the rules.

The Kill Team parts

• One Crit Op per round. Naming the round's Crit Op keeps everyone playing the same mission and makes the results comparable. Players can still play something else if both agree; record what they actually played, not what was planned.
• Faction rules. Decide whether a player brings the same kill team all season or picks per game, and whether they can register more than one. Locking one team makes the league a story about those teams. Allowing several is kinder to people who own a shelf of them.
• Killzones and bonuses. Use the round to set anything else: the killzone, a bonus that's live for the round, a house goal. Write it where players will see it when they sit down, not in a Discord message from three weeks ago.

Keeping it going

The hard part of a league is round four, when the novelty has worn off. A few habits help.

• Report every game. One player reports the score and it counts straight away. Want a second pair of eyes? Turn on Score confirmation in Settings and the other player confirms each result first.
• Close rounds on time. A game that wasn't played by the end of its round needs a decision: a forfeit to the player who tried to schedule it, or a void that counts for nobody. Say which in your rules before it happens, not after.
• Post results where people already are. For most groups that's Discord. A result appearing in the channel is the thing that reminds the next pair to play.
• Reward more than winning. Painting, photos of games, a sportsmanship vote, a Best Painted award at the end. The players at the bottom of the table are the ones who stop turning up, and they need a reason to keep playing that isn't the standings.

A first league, at a glance

If you just want a starting point to copy:

• 8 to 12 players, six rounds, two weeks per round.
• Schedule drawn up front, no rematches.
• 3 / 1 / 0 league points; ties broken by VP difference, then head-to-head.
• One Crit Op named per round.
• Top four into a knockout final.
• A Best Painted vote and a sportsmanship award at the end.

Running it on Pairings Up

The app exists to do the bookkeeping above so the organizer doesn't have to. It's free. Kill Team has its own scorecard here; the same app also runs Warhammer 40,000 and any other tabletop wargame.

1. Create the league and its first season, and pick Kill Team.
2. Under Settings, set the rounds, the league points (3 / 1 / 0 by default), the cap on each of Crit, Kill and Tac Ops (6 by default), the finals size, and the tiebreaker order. The two faction rules are switches there too: Let players pick their faction per game and Let players list multiple factions.
3. Get players in with the season join link or invite codes.
4. Generate the schedule on Competition. It draws every round up front with no rematches, one game per player per round and fair byes. To keep flatmates apart or bring newer players together first, set up groups before you generate. You preview it before anything is saved, and you can still swap pairings by hand afterwards.
5. On each round, press Set to name its Crit Op and write a note (the killzone, a bonus, anything). Players see it on their match card and on the live scorecard. More on the organizer area.
6. Players report their own games, as a quick score or split into Crit, Kill and Tac Ops. The table updates as soon as a game is reported (or confirmed, if your league asks for that). A player who can't decide which team to bring can let the app roll for it.
7. Connect your Discord channel so results post themselves, and anyone can type /standings or /schedule for the table and fixtures.
8. When the regular rounds are done, start finals. The top players by the table go into a knockout bracket seeded so the top two can only meet in the final, and the top seeds get byes if the numbers don't divide evenly. Finals results don't change the league table.
9. Wrap up with awards, and share the season page and yearbook with the store that hosted you.

Something go wrong mid-season? A wrong score, a forfeit or a void is fixed from the match history, and every change is logged for the league to see. See Changing a result.