This week saw the drop of one other key piece of Warhammer 40k content: The Chapter Approved Tournament Companion. Similar to the one we received for Leviathan and Pariah Nexus, this document outlines key errata and changes for the 2025-26 missions pack and gives guidelines for tournament organizers using the new pack, including missions to select and terrain layouts. New to this one is a base sizing guide for every model in the game.
If you’re looking for details of the rest of the summer’s updates, you can find them below:
- The 2025-26 Chapter Approved Missions Deck
- Our review of the June 2025 Balance Update
- The new Datasheets, FAQs, and Errata
Finally, before we dive in, we’d like to thank Games Workshop for providing us with a preview copy of this packet for review purposes.
What Is the Chapter Approved Tournament Companion?
Simply put, the Tournament Companion is a set of additional rules and guidelines for playing Warhammer 40,000 at events and tournaments. This includes some additional balance changes as well as recommended terrain layouts and mission/rule combinations. This packet is designed to create the most level playing field for players meeting up to play a game using the Pariah Nexus missions.
Aren’t These Rules Just for Matched Play?
Sure they are – you don’t have to use the Tournament Companion in your casual games, or in Crusade. That said, we’d strongly recommend you use at least some of these rules when playing in casual games, as the changes in the Tournament Companion are designed to make the game more fun and feel more balanced for players of any skill level, not just tournament grinders.
While you may not be playing competitive missions in your Crusade campaign, the terrain layouts offer some really great guidance on what makes a good terrain layout in tenth edition – they include limited lines of sight, lots of usable cover, and healthy spacing of ruins around the battlefield with large footprints which can block line of sight. Even if you don’t want to build purely symmetrical battlefields, there’s a lot of great lessons to learn from how these are laid out, and for which deployment zones.
Changes to the Mission Sequence
The Mission Sequence rules here are largely similar to those in the Chapter Approved missions deck. The biggest difference is that, similar to Pariah Nexus, you’ll choose missions from one of the pre-generated sets in the Chapter Approved Mission Pool. These are combinations of primary Missions, deployment, and terrain layouts which work well together.
There’s also a note in here about objective markers – if you’re new to competitive play, here is where you’ll find out that in tournament play, objective markers aren’t real and models can stand on them.
Changes to Missions
Similar to Leviathan and Pariah Nexus, this companion makes some changes to the Secondary Missions in its deck, as well as the Mission Rules. There’s really only one change here: The No Prisoners Secondary Mission cannot be selected as a Fixed secondary mission. This is a good thing, as it prevents some incredibly nasty play patterns when combined with Cull the Horde or Bring it Down, incentivizing players to just kill opponents and making armies like Knights and Genestealer Cults less competitively viable.
Where are Twists and Asymmetrical Missions?
Twists and Asymmetrical missions were not considered appropriate for competitive play, so you will get no use out of those cards here. We can all breathe a sigh of relief. The companion is also only for Strike Force size games, so you can also leave all your Incursion deployment cards at home.
The Chapter Approved Rules Update and FAQ
There are a few FAQ items in the Chapter Approved Tournament Companion to clear things up (in particular around Actions), and one important rules change.
Notable FAQ Items
- Attached Units and Actions. A few key items here focus on Attached units, a perpetual source of headaches in tenth edition rules. The first item is that if a unit with an attached character does an action and then the attached unit is killed, the remaining character is still doing/can complete the action.
- Marked for Death with Attached Units. In order to score Marked, you need to destroy the Attached unit and at least one of the leader units attached to it in order to score Marked for Death.
- Marked for Death can’t pick attached Leaders. You can only pick the whole unit.
- Terraform can now be done on objectives an opponent has terraformed. This is a big change to the way the mission works, and they’ve added a not reiterating it here to avoid any confusion.
- Burden of Trust and Scoring. This one’s weird, and likely incorrect given the wording of Burden of Trust. The FAQ suggests that the player going first can score VP for defending an objective marker they control five times in a game, though the mission rules suggest this should only be 4 – the idea is that the player going second can guard an objective in round 1 and score it in round 2 to offset not being able to score in round 5.
- The Ritual Measures from the center of objective markers. This is still true.
- Sabotage only requires your unit not be within your Deployment zone. The terrain can be in your DZ, as long as you can get a unit within that terrain feature.
- Killing units who stand back up still counts for Assassination and other kill-based secondary missions. This one was also pretty commonly known but always worth repeating.
The Tournament Mission Pool
There are the same 20 mission types from Pariah Nexus, with a few key changes
- Obviously, mission rules are out. No more having to ask the table next to you which one is advance and action and which one is shoot and action.
- Unexploded Ordnance doesn’t show up at all. Few people will notice.
- Burden of Trust is also out. It was always one of the more complicated missions, and a little unfair at times in Pariah Nexus. They altered it a bit for the Chapter Approved deck, but I guess they thought it still wasn’t ready for primetime.
- The Ritual, in a shocker, is also cut. A seeming favorite of the GW Open scene, it was also one of the more complicated missions and always seemed to be drawn on Sunday mornings.
- Hidden Supplies, the new primary, shows up three times, on missions F, I, and N. Is this a stealth announcement of the long rumored Fishmen army book for Old World???
We couldn’t be happier to see Unexploded Ordnance not make the cut. That mission was bad. There are a number of solid picks here, and the updated primary missions make these much more palatable.
Terrain Layouts
Once again, we have eight layouts in the Chapter Approved Tournament Companion. The first 6 are returning unchanged from Pariah Nexus, and the last two have some changes:
- Layout 7 sees the middlemost large ruins shift 3” vertically and 1” horizontally towards the center, and the smaller 4×6 area that used to be attached to them is now attached to the outermost large ruins against the board edge. The other central ruins, the ones with the 4×6 and 5×10 areas connected, shift 3” vertically away from the center to keep the movement lane about the same size as before. This opens up small firing lanes on the outer middle sections of the board, makes the central firing lanes less steep, and gives you more room to protect your deployment zone on short edge deployments
- Layout 8 kills the infamous “roundabout of death”, to the relief of all American players who don’t know how those things work. The 4×6 sections are now in pairs, attached on their short ends and positioned 22” vertically and 23” horizontally away from the board edges. This is going to be so much easier to set up and be subject to far less mid game drift. This does mean that there is now a pair of straight shooting lines through the center of the board.
Neither of the original layouts 7 or 8 were all that popular, so changing them up is unlikely to ruffle a lot of feathers. I, for one, am glad to never have to deal with layout 8 again – that central area was never fun to deal with, especially when the underlying tables were not exactly even.
There has been no change as to which layouts are suggested for which layout. Dawn of War is once again limited to only layout 5, ensuring that we’ll have another year where it’s unlikely to be seen at major tournaments.
What It All Means
Ultimately, this is going to define how missions are played for the next year at events, particularly singles events. In that regard, this Tournament Companion does a lot of things right, and we think that removing No Prisoners from the Fixed Pool is the right call. The only major issue here is Burden of Trust, where the ruling written for it just appears to be flatly incorrect. But otherwise, this is good and we’re happy to see no inclusion of Unexploded Ordnance in the missions this time around. The exclusion of the Ritual is a little more interesting – The Ritual was a frustrating mission before because it more or less guaranteed a player going second could score the Unbroken Wall Secret Mission if they had 2-3 units on the table, but we won’t miss that one, either – especially with Stalwarts out of the mix.
On that note, the loss of mission rules here is a much bigger deal. Effects that used to have a major impact on the game – Stalwarts, Prepared Positions, and Fog of War, especially – are now non-factors, and as a result, it’s much less important to bring Battleline units in your armies. This opens things up a bit more for skew lists to thrive, especially with easier scoring and catch-up mechanics available to players who spend early turns focused more on killing the opponent than scoring.
Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.
