What are the deployment zones in 40K 11th edition?

How is the deployment zone decided in an 11th edition event?

Missions are played on a 44 by 60 inch battlefield. Each combination of Primary Missions has three recommended layouts, labelled A, B and C, printed at the end of the Event Companion and carried in the official app; the event organiser either names the layout or has the players determine it randomly, and the Companion recommends running A, B and C in order and repeating. The layout card shows the terrain, the objectives and both deployment zones, so once the pairing and the letter are known, the zone is known.

Players then agree which edges of their table match the Attacker's and Defender's battlefield edges on the card and roll off; the winner decides who is the Attacker and who is the Defender. Armies deploy one unit at a time, alternating, each unit wholly within its own deployment zone, with the Defender setting up first; a player who sets up a Titanic unit skips their next turn to set up. Everything not inside either zone is no man's land, and each player's territory is the half of the battlefield that holds their zone.

One thing the Companion says it does not use is worth knowing before you look for a deployment card: its designer's note leaves the mission deck's Deployment and Twist cards to pick-up-and-play games. At an event the layout is the whole deployment rule, and the Companion names the zones only Attacker and Defender.

Paraphrased from the Warhammer Event Companion, Version 1.3 (Warhammer Event Mission Sequence steps 3, 4, 5 and 8; the Terrain Layouts introduction; the Layouts Key), the free PDF linked from the Warhammer Community downloads hub, read 19 October 2026. Its "Layouts updated" line reads "None", so the layouts match the version the measurements below were taken from. The rules are theirs, the paraphrase is ours; take the PDF to the event.

What are the six deployment zone shapes?

Lay the 45 layouts' zone outlines over each other and only six shapes remain. Every shape is mirrored through the centre of the board, so your zone and your opponent's always match in size. The names below are ours, chosen to describe the geometry; the Companion names none of them.

Computed on 19 October 2026 from the zone polygons in 40 Carrot's layout data (board inches, 60 across by 44 down), which were measured from the Companion's vector outlines: area by the shoelace formula, the gap as the shortest distance between the two outlines. Depths are given to the inch where the measured value sits within a tenth of one; the two step shapes measure 19.9 and 14.0 inches at their deepest. Ten layouts share the short-edge step outline to within a tenth of an inch and are counted together.

Two readings fall out of the table. The quartered zones are the smallest and the closest together, so a layout drawn that way puts first-turn pressure on the corner points before anything else. The strips are the largest and, with the diagonals, the furthest apart: on those boards the first move decides little, and the step shapes sit between the two.

How far is the nearest objective from your zone edge?

A model set up on the edge of its zone starts a fixed distance from every marker outside it, and that distance is set by the layout, not by the dice. The table gives, for each shape, the distance from the centre of the board to the zone edge and the range across its layouts of the nearest contested objective (a central or expansion marker) from either zone edge. Home objectives sit inside their zone on all 45 layouts.

Distances run from the objective marker's centre to the nearest point of the zone outline, in board inches, rounded to a tenth; "nearest contested" takes the closest central or expansion marker to each zone and reports the lowest and highest value found across that shape's layouts.

Worked on the first layout in the Companion: Take and Hold against Take and Hold, Layout A, the Battlefield Dominance mission, which uses the short-edge step. The central objective sits 10.0 inches from the Attacker's zone edge and 10.1 from the Defender's. The two expansion objectives sit 6.1 and 7.3 inches from the zone nearer to each, and 22.0 and 20.9 inches from the zone across the board. Both home objectives are inside their zones. So on that board one expansion marker is yours for a short move and the other is a full turn's march; the central marker is the same reach for both players.

How do you check a zone on a true-scale table?

The geometry above tells you the distances; the table tells you whether your units fit. A zone 12 inches deep holds fewer 60 millimetre bases than a tape measure suggests once terrain and coherency are in the way, which is the step the arithmetic skips.

Drag a model to the zone edge and read the distance

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