I've been regularly playing this game since it originally released in 2021, and have participated in (and even won!) several tournaments over the last three years. However, a new edition of the game launched in September with updated and expanded rules, leaving a lot of my prior knowledge out of date. A part of my reason for signing up for this tournament was to give me motivation to learn the new rules -- and paint a new team of miniatures.

To prepare for the tournament, there are three key things I need to do -- learn the rules, pick a team, and paint that team. This is reflected in the language used in the tournament pack supplied to participants. It states that "each player will need to demonstrate astute knowledge of the game, make sound tactical decisions and select appropriate operatives and equipment to win their games," and that all miniatures must "be fully assembled and painted to a Battle Ready standard."

The tournament, then, can be thought of as our central literacy event. To participate, I will be engaging in three literacy practices: a tabletop games literacy, a metagame literacy, and an artistic literacy. Each functions differently, but all are key to meaningful social participation.

This padlet will follow my journey as I attempt to meet these standards in time for the tournament, documenting and analyzing the interweaving literacies I will be demonstrating throughout the process.

In tabletop games like Kill Team, this 'metagame literacy' most often takes the form of knowledge of the strongest or 'best' teams that can be chosen in the current competitive environment. The importance of this metagame literacy has resulted in a large amount of written and video content surrounding Kill Team, with guides purporting to help players navigate the impressive amounts of information needed to understand the competitive context of the game.

The attached article is one such guide, meant to help players understand the current metagame by ranking the playable teams into 'tiers' based on their competitive viability. Written explicitly for players "trying to find what the best kill team is for them to play or to watch out for at tournaments," the guide requires a high level of literacy in the rules and available teams of Kill Team, and is only likely to be much of a help for players engaging with the game at a high level. Casual players, or players focused on using Kill Team as a narrative engine, will not find this guide as useful. In some cases, this guide may even hurt the experience of more casual players -- if one member of a casual play group begins treating the game too competitively, this can cause the experience to be less fun for everyone involved. Like any literacy event, context is important! (Mace, 2005)

The text itself is very straightforward and direct, with a chart ranking the teams followed by a short paragraph explaining why the author (an experienced player well-known in the Kill Team community) chose to rank them as he did. The author wastes no time defining terms or explaining every detail, assuming that readers are already familiar with the game if they thought to seek out this kind of content.

Knowing where to find these guides (or even knowing that these guides exist at all), along with tournament reports, interviews with top players, and other ancillary metagame-focused content, constitutes a kind of literacy-within-a-literacy. Not just a metagame-literacy, but a literacy in quickly developing new metagame-literacies that can likely only be gained through experience in other competitive games.

I'm starting to go a bit off the deep end here, I still have a team to pick!

For more information on the team I read the above article, which details how the team plays and the different operatives and equipment they can bring. This article is more comprehensive and explanatory than the tier list article, as the author assumes the reader isn't familiar with the team and needs more information.

As an experienced player who has used several different teams in the past, I know the type of teams I prefer to use and was looking for these qualities while reading the review. For example, I learned that Nemesis Claw are considered an 'elite' team, meaning they take fewer, but more powerful operatives into a match. This means I would only have to manage six miniatures on the board instead of 10-15, which I prefer as it allows me to more quickly assess potential courses of action. This also means less painting -- an important factor, as the tournament is only a couple months away!

Just like with knowledge of the Warhammer 40,000 books, having a well painted Kill Team is also a way for players to obtain cultural capital during these literacy events. Players will openly admire each other's work, and an award is given to the player with the best painted Kill Team. Many people only engage with Warhammer through the hobbyist side, only buying the minis to assemble and paint and never playing the game. But while some competitive players only paint their miniatures because they have to, most people who play Kill Team do so because playing with painted miniatures is a part of the appeal -- two teams of well-painted miniatures on painted, thematic terrain looks a lot better than grey plastic, and adds quite a lot to the experience of the game.

However, painting miniatures requires a completely different set of skills (and a completely different literacy) from the rest of the game. Instead of games-literacy or metagame-literacy, this requires an artistic-literacy -- specifically one focused on the technical skills, equipment, and methods used to paint a plastic miniature. In order to learn and develop these skills, many hobbyists use video guides like the one above to learn how to paint.

As specified in the full title, this is a video aimed at intermediate painters interested in painting a Nemesis Claw team. This is done by doing a step-by-step breakdown of how to paint one of the miniatures with a method that can be applied across the entire team. The video assumes the viewer has a preexisting knowledge of miniature painting, and either doesn't explain or only briefly explains techniques like paint thinning or drybrushing. The video is presented in an upbeat, friendly manner, and everything the presenter does is clearly explained and shown to the camera to avoid confusion or misunderstanding -- an important part of an instructional text.

I used this video as an initial basis for my painting, but I made a number of changes to the paint 'recipe' by substituting different colours and techniques. For example, I used a more golden metal colour for the armour trim as I thought the bronze colour used in the video looked off-putting. I also use a different (and more difficult) method of painting the eye lenses and plasma weapons, as I feel the method used in the video gives a very flat-looking result.

As with mastering the rules or metagame of Kill Team, improving artistic literacy comes with experience and time, along with constant engagement with literacy events, practices, and texts. By preparing for this tournament, I feel like I have been able to improve my literacy in all aspects of this game, enriching my enjoyment and participation in this (admittedly kinda silly) hobby. I can't wait for the tournament itself, where I will have the chance to meet and play against other people who are also literate in the ways I am, with all of us co-creating an experience defined and structured by these multiple layers of literacy.

Now enough with the writing! I have little serial killers to paint!

• Aaron Dembski-Bowden, Night Lords

Metagame viability and playstyle are not the only reasons I chose the Nemesis Claw, however. They are representatives of a larger faction within the fiction of Warhammer 40,000 -- the Night Lords -- who happen to be the focus of my favourite book written for this setting.

Warhammer 40,000 as a setting has largely been shaped by a team of writers and artists employed by Games Workshop, working together to create a coherent shared universe. While the most visible part of this universe is the miniatures and associated tabletop games, hundreds of books and short stories set in the 41st millennium have also been published. These books vary in length, tone, and quality, but together constitute one of the largest intertextual fictional settings in all of science fiction. For fans of the setting, reading and discussing these books has become a shared literacy practice, with knowledge of characters, events, and locations from these books used as a kind of cultural capital (Bordieu, 1984) in fandom spaces. The more you have read, the bigger a fan you are.

I have personally read well over 50 of these books (I know), and my favourites, by a significant margin, are the Night Lords novels by Aaron Dembski-Bowden. While I won't bore you with the details, the Night Lords trilogy is one of the few pieces of Warhammer fiction that stands on its own as a piece of imaginative and powerful science-fiction writing, with an appeal that goes beyond its connection to an intellectual property. At its core, the trilogy is a story of failed revolutionaries adrift without a purpose, searching for a "life with meaning" in a world where that seems impossible. The themes and characters in these books impacted me deeply, and that relationship with the text is one of the biggest reasons for me choosing the Nemesis Claw Kill Team for this tournament.

Now I just have to paint them!

The text is presented in a clear, visually striking manner, with many images and visual flourishes to make the rules easy to quickly read and navigate. This reflects the book's use as an in-game resource, as players (especially new players) will need to consult the book to find rules clarifications during a game. Rules explanations are thorough and precisely worded -- removing ambiguity to prevent misunderstandings or arguments is a part of the text's role as a gaming aid.

The beginning of the book has information many experienced players will skip, but is included as a way to make explicit the parts of the game that are generally implicit. This includes written explanations of what the game is, what it should feel like to play and what types of decisions are expected of the player.

This section also includes an image of two people playing, talking and moving miniatures. One is a man, and one is a woman. As a traditionally male-dominated hobby, women can have a difficult time entering tabletop gaming spaces due to 'gatekeeper' attitudes taken by misogynist fans. As an attempt to counter this culture, the text takes care to show images of a woman playing and enjoying the game, signaling that this is a game that can be enjoyed by everyone. While this type of signaling is not always successful, it does indicate a desire on the part of Games Workshop to change the male-dominated "social meaning" (Barton & Hamilton, 2012) of its literacy events.

Having a comprehensive understanding of the rules allows for players to act with intention and mastery within the space defined by the game. A player who is literate in the rules of Kill Team can, for example, better make a judgement on where to move an operative in order to benefit from cover or secure an advantageous firing position. In this way, literacy in the game manifests as expertise in the game -- a more literate player may not always make the optimal decision (that type of skill comes with experience), but they have the prerequisite knowledge needed to be able to make the optimal decision that a less literate player would lack.

Squire (2008) defines video game literacy as "developing expertise in designing rewarding experiences for oneself within a gameworld (particularly within the game’s semiotic and rule systems)." We can apply a similar definition to tabletop games -- literacy in a game takes the form of expertise, which allows players to navigate the rules of the game and create a rewarding experience for themselves.

What counts as a 'rewarding' experience in Kill Team will be different from player to player. For some, this would mean prioritizing fun, for others the creation of a shared narrative. For many tournament players, a rewarding experience means a fair, competitive match in which they have a reasonable chance at victory. This type of experience can only be achieved through expertise in the game's rules, which is a consequence of developing a literacy specific to the game. In this way, literacy in Kill Team is a material advantage to the competitive player -- a reflection of the way literacy can give material benefits to individuals in real life as well!

In service of both of these uses, this text is designed to be quick to read and reference. Headings are large and clear, with the actual rules text kept to an absolute minimum. This makes checking this document for specific rules or explanations much faster than flipping through a book looking for an answer. For newer players, the massively reduced amount of text can feel more approachable and manageable than the prospect of reading a full rulebook cover to cover. Plus, the lite rules are free, and the full rules certainly aren't. For anyone curious about the game this document is an accessible way to learn how it works without an initial investment.

However, this version of the rules lacks information clarifying edge cases, defining general terms, and contextualizing the game, meaning that the full rules (and the cost associated) are still needed for the full Kill Team experience. In most cases, players will use a combination of the two texts during the game -- the lite rules for quick reference, and the full rules for more specific questions about how the game works. Both texts were designed with these physical and social contexts in mind, (Mace, 2005) and were shaped by the conventions of the literacy event they were made for.

It is each player's responsibility to understand and remember their own team's rules, as the opposing player is not expected to know these rules. This means that if a player forgets to apply some advantage or bonus they are entitled to, their opponent likely won't (or can't) remind them. Good players demonstrate literacy not only by understanding their own rules, meaning that they can take advantage of every tool in their team's toolkit, but also the rules of other teams, meaning they can play around the toolkits of their enemies.

This understanding of the game outside of your chosen team -- and how your chosen team fits within the game's competitive ecosystem (or 'metagame') -- is explored in the next section.

Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Harvard University Press.

Mace, J. (2005), ‘Events, Practices and Values’ in Fowler, E. & Mace, J. (eds) Outside the Classroom: researching literacy in adult learners. Leicester: NIACE, pp. 1-23

Squire, K. D. (2014). Video-game literacy: A literacy of expertise. In Handbook of research on new literacies (pp. 635-670). Routledge.