Good morning, ladies and gentlemen (or evening, depending on your locale)! Today, I want to cover a rarely discussed topic: Objectives. Objectives are essentially the win condition for most games of competitive 40k, and yet they're one of the least discussed aspects of the game strategically. If you're going to center your entire game plan around holding poker chips on a table, shouldn't you try to optimize their placement?

First, I think it's vital to identify the different factors that you should consider from an objective placement standpoint:

-Your army's overall strategy and play style

-Your opponent's overall strategy and play style

-Terrain

-Deployment Style

-Match up

I'm going to preface all the things you should do when placing objectives by showing what NOT to do. Here, we see a standard table with objectives scattered about fairly evenly. This layout fundamentally demonstrates two players who didn't think strategically about where they were placing objectives. Rather, they just put them "where they felt like" or "where they looked fine." You will rarely find a situation where both armies and players want an evenly dispersed and moderately spread objective placement like that. While you and your opponent's goals may align on where to place objectives (typically mirror matches or similar style lists), they still don't want them in this conservative, middle-of-the-road objective placement.

Many army styles naturally gravitate towards board control, combat capability, and keeping their forces centralized. Examples of this include Tyranids, Ork hordes, Iron Hands, etc. When playing with this type of list, place objectives so you don't have to go out of your way to score them. You want to capture objectives as your army functions normally.

Here's a great example of how to set objectives as someone who plans on moving his army into the middle of the table. All the objectives are centrally placed, and 12″ from at least any other two objectives (as close as they can be). Imagine a horde of Intercessors sitting in the middle of the table there. They would own four objectives, meaning they can just sit there in the middle of the board doing nothing (their natural state of being) while simultaneously winning the game.