The 5 Kinds of Primary Mission in Warhammer 40K 11th Edition

The current Chapter Approved season ships twenty-five primary missions. Nobody memorises twenty-five cards, and you do not need to — because underneath them there are only about five ways a primary mission can ask you to score. Once you can sort a card into its archetype at a glance, you know what your army needs to do before you have finished reading it.

This is a breakdown of those archetypes, what each one rewards, and how they should change the way you build and deploy.

Why archetype beats memorisation

Primary missions differ in wording far more than they differ in function. Two cards that read completely differently can want the identical thing from your army — bodies on the middle of the table from turn two — while a third card that looks superficially similar wants something else entirely.

Sorting by archetype gives you three things at deployment:

The five archetypes

1. Objective control

The default. You score for holding objectives, usually checked at the end of your turn, with the amount scaling by how many you hold or which ones.

The variations are mostly about *which* objectives count and *when*. Some cards care specifically about the central objectives. Some pay a large lump in the first battle round and less thereafter, which front-loads the whole game. Some scale — one amount for holding any, more for holding three or more.

What it rewards: Objective Control as a stat, durable mid-board units, and having enough separate units to hold multiple points at once.

What it punishes: Elite armies with few bodies, and any plan that concedes the centre early intending to take it back later.

Deployment consequence: Get on the middle objectives in round one or two. Every turn you are not scoring here is a turn you cannot recover.

2. Kill-based

You score for destroying enemy units this turn — sometimes flat, sometimes per unit destroyed, sometimes with a condition attached about which of your units did the killing or where.

What it rewards: Damage output spread across enough units to kill *something* every single turn. Note that most of these cards ask for "one or more enemy units destroyed", not "the most damage" — killing one cheap unit scores exactly the same as killing three expensive ones.

What it punishes: All-in alpha strikes. Wiping half your opponent's army in turn two and then having nothing left to kill in turns three, four and five scores badly on a card that pays per turn.

Deployment consequence: Hold something back that can reliably kill a unit in the late game. A cheap, accurate shooting unit that survives is worth more here than one big hammer.

3. Action-based

You score for performing a specified action — securing an asset, extracting a relic, conducting a vanguard operation, committing sabotage. A unit spends its activation doing the thing instead of fighting.

What it rewards: Cheap, expendable, fast units whose combat contribution you will not miss. Action economy is the whole game on these cards: every action costs you a unit's turn.

What it punishes: Lists made entirely of expensive units that all want to shoot. If your cheapest unit costs 150 points, spending its turn on an action hurts.

Deployment consequence: Identify your action-performers before turn one and keep them out of harm's way. Losing your only cheap unit on turn two can cost you the primary for the rest of the game.

4. Marker and terrain

You place markers, decoy objectives, trap terrain areas or select targets in advance, and score based on what happens around them. These are the cards with the most pre-game decision-making — several ask you to choose terrain features or place operation markers before or at the start of the battle.

What it rewards: Reading the terrain layout properly and thinking a turn ahead. These cards give the biggest edge to the player who understands the mission best, because the choices are made under no time pressure and compound over five turns.

What it punishes: Playing on autopilot. A bad marker placement on turn one is unrecoverable.

Deployment consequence: Slow down. This is the one archetype where five minutes of thought before the first dice roll is worth more than anything you do afterwards.

5. Positioning and movement

You score for being somewhere specific — controlling your opponent's home objective, having units wholly within different table quarters, taking objectives you did not hold last turn.

What it rewards: Speed, and units that can operate alone deep in enemy territory. The card that pays a large lump for holding your opponent's home objective is the clearest example — it is a single enormous payout for a play that most armies cannot make at all.

What it punishes: Slow, castled armies. If your whole list wants to sit in a bubble, these cards are close to unscoreable.

Deployment consequence: Commit early. Positioning payouts usually need you to already be moving in round one, not deciding in round three.

Building a list that handles all five

You do not know which primary you will play, so the goal is not to optimise for one archetype — it is to never be helpless in any of them.

A list that covers the field usually has:

The cheap mobile units are the highest-leverage inclusion. They score actions, they take distant objectives, they hold table quarters, and they are the thing elite lists most often lack. If you are choosing between one more expensive unit and two cheap fast ones, the primary missions are an argument for the cheap ones.

Our army composition guide covers the structural limits within which you have to fit all of this, and the Core stratagems guide covers Rapid Ingress, which is one of the strongest tools for late-game positioning scores.

Tracking it during the game

Primary scoring in 11th happens at specific moments — most commonly the end of your turn, sometimes your command phase, occasionally the start of your turn — and different cards pay in different rounds. Missing a scoring window because you were mid-Fight-phase is a genuinely common way to lose.

GrimSlate's battle tracker carries the current mission set, shows both players' primary panels, and prompts at the scoring moments so nothing gets skipped. Scores, CP and round state are tracked together, and there is a log afterwards for working out where the game actually turned.

Quick reference