We’re a few weeks into the Chapter Approved 2025-26 missions pack, and that’s ample time to collect data on games being played in the Tabletop Battles App – which, if you missed it, supports the new mission pack. Since the missions pack went live we’ve collected data on 7,659 games played by users of the app, and with those we can look at how scoring in the new format has changed.
Today we’ll be specifically looking at Primary and Secondary objective scoring and some stats around going first. We’re still working on Challenger Cards data and will be looking at those separately in a future Hammer of Math article, so stay tuned for those. All of the data here comes from the Tabletop Battles App, and you can find everything I used on our stats site, 40kstats.
For expediency’s sake, I’m going to henceforth refer to the “Chapter 2025-26 Missions Pack” as “CA25.”
Primary Scoring in CA25
At first glance, primary scoring in CA25 hasn’t changed much – while Pariah Nexus saw a jump in primary scoring from Leviathan. This was primarily due to changes in the primary missions allowing for more scoring from things like actions – which were more or less introduced with Pariah Nexus – and improvements to missions like Purge the Foe.
Primary scoring in CA25 appears to be on par with what we saw in Pariah Nexus, and the shifts we’re seeing right now – less than one point – aren’t large enough to be considered statistically significant, especially with fewer than eight thousand games in our sample. What is worth noting however, is the First Turn Advantage for each – we chart the difference in margin for going first vs. going second in each mission:
Generally speaking, things are pretty close; going second is still a clear advantage in Purge the Foe, and things have improved substantially in Burden of Trust, while Linchpin appears to favor the player going first. Where this shows a bigger improvement is from Pariah Nexus, where through a larger sample of games, only Purge the Foe reliably advantaged the player going second, suggesting a shift here that’s worth monitoring. We’ll dive more into this over the next few weeks as we continue to look at scoring. Primary scoring is an interesting beast; while there are major advantages to going second – players going second typically can make up a large amount of points through end-of-turn scoring in the final round, they may simply lose out before that happens, particularly if they get too aggressive or the player going first can sacrifice primary scoring in order to table their opponent.
Secondary Mission Scoring
There’s a lot there to take in. The biggest takeaway here is that you jerks aren’t drawing and recording cards correctly: When Cull the Horde is drawn and can’t be scored, it should be recorded as drawn and then discarded in your Command phase. Y’all are messing up the math here.
The second takeaway is that most of these secondaries are worth about 3 VP when you draw them. The big exceptions here are Extend Battle Lines and Secure No Man’s Land, which remain slam dunks as free VP more or less, and Establish Locus and Behind Enemy Lines, which are much harder to score. Players largely tend to ignore fixed missions these days – a good thing, in my opinion – but when they don’t, Bring it Down is the clear favorite, bringing in an average of 14 VP per game. Though this may go up with the changes to Imperial and Chaos Knights making those armies more viable. Assassination is the clear second favorite, though even against big knight armies you may struggle to score more than 12 with it.
So how does this stack up to Pariah Nexus? Let’s do a quick comparison:
Most things haven’t changed much – the big ones here to watch are:
- Bring it Down, where scoring has changed to a flat 4 VP vs. variable scoring based on the number of vehicles destroyed – this raises the floor on scoring while preventing the occasional monster turn with 8+ points.
- Recover Assets, where the change to timing on scoring means it’s much easier to score, and will be less likely to get discarded.
- Extend Battle Lines, where the drop in scoring cap from 5 to 4 lines up wtih the 0.8 VP drop here on average scoring.
On the whole, the averages here per secondary are about the same – 2.6 for both. This is because the increases across secondary objectives like Marked for Death, Recover Assets, Bring it Down, and Cleanse make up for the loss of Containment (4.1 average VP).
What this means is that generally, if you want to score 100 VP in a game, you’ll still want to enact a policy of aggressive cycling – that’s something we explored a while back and it tends to still be true; while we expect that overall scoring may increase in CA25 as a result of challenger missions, it’s less likely that being down 6+ VP at some point in the game will happen at the same time as scoring 100 VP, so the ceiling may not increase nearly as much. So if you want to hit that max score, be prepared to cycle a secondary objective whenever you don’t think you can score 7+ in a round.
What This Means
Right now, it’s mostly a novelty. There are some things we’re keeping an eye on – the disadvantage in primary scoring correlates with a general disadvantage to going first that we’re sure will have some kind of impact/entanglement with Challenger cards. But it’s early days with that dataset and we’re still collecting more data and trying to figure out what works. Initial data suggests that going first is generally very undesirable in any mission except for Burden of Trust (more on this in the future, since it doesn’t line up with the primary data), and while primary scoring is slightly lower, it’s not so much lower that we’d expect to see these results – this may be a Challenger impact at work. We’ll be back in future articles to investigate that more fully.
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