Terrain is the cheapest thing you can buy that changes how Warhammer 40,000 plays. A table with nothing on it is two gunlines shooting each other flat by turn two; the same armies across a board with real cover is the game people describe when they talk about 40k being good. And unlike a codex or a squad, terrain is a one-off - you buy a table once and it works for every army you will ever own.
Games Workshop currently sell six boxed terrain sets: products that come with a gaming board as well as the scenery, so one purchase furnishes one table. This guide ranks all six on a single question - how much usable terrain do you get on the table for the money - and then covers the fifteen individual kits, which are the better answer if you already have a board.
Two things worth knowing before the list.
"Set" means it comes with a board. That is the line drawn here and it is not cosmetic: a box with a board gives you a table tonight, and a box without one gives you a building to add to a table you already have. All six below have one. The fifteen kits further down do not.
Half of these boxes only make sense inside their own game. The Gallowdark and Tomb World walls build interiors - corridors and hatchways, played almost entirely at close range. They are superb at that and close to useless as a normal 40k battlefield, where you want ruins you can see through and shoot over. Read the ranking with that in mind rather than reading it as "best to worst plastic".
1. Combat Patrol Terrain Set: Battlezone
Fifteen terrain pieces, a double-sided board sized for Combat Patrol, and a set of terrain footprints. It is the one on this list that answers the question most people are actually asking, which is "how do I get a 40k table".
The pieces are generic Imperial ruins - the sort of thing that belongs on any battlefield in the setting, against any opponent, in any mission. Nothing in the box is tied to a game mode, a faction or a season. And the footprints are a better idea than they sound: they are cut-outs for laying the terrain out consistently, so a game starts with a board rather than with an argument about whether that ruin is too far forward.
The catch is size. It is a Combat Patrol board, not a full-size one, so a 2,000-point game will want more than this holds. As a first terrain purchase it is still the one to beat: everything in it survives every later upgrade.
2. Killzone: Volkus
A double-sided 30 by 22 inch board and fourteen pieces in thirty-five components: two buildings, two large ruins, two small ruins and eight bits of scatter.
Volkus is the killzone that looks like a Warhammer table. Where the other three build a specific interior, this one builds a ruined city block - broad ruins with firing positions, rubble, the shapes you already picture when you picture 40k. That matters commercially as well as aesthetically: the terrain leaves the killzone happily. Put the Volkus ruins on a bigger board next to a Combat Patrol Battlezone and nothing looks out of place.
If you play Kill Team and also play 40k and want one box to serve both, this is the one.
3. Warhammer 40,000 Boarding Actions Terrain Set
Two folding boards and two complete Gallowdark wall sets - roughly sixty pieces of wall, pillar and hatchway between them, including eight short walls with hatchways and pillars, sixteen long wall sections in four patterns, thirty-two pillars and four wall ends.
By weight of plastic this is the biggest terrain purchase Games Workshop sell, and per piece it is the cheapest of the six. It is third here rather than first for one reason: it is the same walls twice. Buying it gets you a very large interior and nothing that works outdoors. If boarding actions are what you play, it is unambiguously the best value on this page. If they are not, it is a lot of corridor.
4. Killzone: Tomb World
A 606 by 703mm double-sided board and twenty-five modular pieces in seventy-four components - the Necron wall set in long, short, pillared, hatchway and breach-point variants, plus sixteen pillars, a sarcophagus, two teleport pads and four pieces of debris.
The most recent of the four killzones and the second-largest piece count on the list. It ranks below Volkus and the Boarding Actions set on one honest limitation: the architecture is committed. Tomb World looks like a Necron tomb and will look like a Necron tomb behind every army you ever put on it. The sarcophagus and the teleport pads are lovely models; they are also very specific ones.
5. Killzone: Gallowdark
A 30 by 22 inch double-sided board and thirty-four pieces in a hundred and eight components - sixteen pillars, four wall ends, and a set of long and short walls with and without hatchways.
Gallowdark is the derelict space-hulk interior, and it is the cheapest of the six at Games Workshop's own price. It changes the game more than any other box here - corridors, blind corners, everything resolved at knife range - and if that is the game you want, this is the smallest amount of money that buys it.
It is fifth because the piece count flatters it. Thirty-four pieces sounds enormous next to Bheta-Decima's nine, but most of them are one wall segment repeated, and every one of them is an interior wall. Compare it to the Boarding Actions set above before buying: that box is two of these.
6. Killzone: Bheta-Decima
A double-sided board, a Ferratonic Furnace and eight gantries - two large, four medium, two small - in seventy-six components.
Fewest pieces on the list and last on the money-for-plastic question, but it is the only one of the six that builds upwards. Bheta-Decima is platforms and walkways above the board: vantage points everywhere, movement that goes up as often as across, and a game that plays unlike any of the other five.
The redeeming feature for a 40k player is compatibility - it is Sector Mechanicus architecture, so the gantries stand happily beside the Sacristan Forgeshrine and the rest of that range. Bought as an upgrade to an existing industrial table it is a much better buy than it looks bought cold.
If you already have a board: the fifteen individual kits
A board is the expensive half of a terrain collection and most people already own something that works as one. If that is you, skip every box above and buy scenery by the piece. Games Workshop sell fifteen individual 40,000 terrain kits, and we price all of them:
Buildings you can occupy - Battlezone Manufactorum: Sanctum Administratus is a ruined multi-storey administratum with gantries and firing positions, and the single best value on the list if you want one commanding centrepiece. Sub-Cloister and Storage Fane builds as two small buildings or one larger one, thirteen push-fit components, with second-floor vantage points on two of the pieces. Battlezone Fronteris: STC Hab-Bunker and Stockades is the armoured frontier-world equivalent.
Ruins, which are what most tables are short of - Sector Imperialis Ruins is four gothic city sections in twenty-four components and has been the default answer to "I need more cover" for years; its fittings are dimensioned to match the Sector Mechanicus range, so it combines. Battlefield Armageddon: Manufactorum Ruins is the newer push-fit take - four large and four small sections, twenty components, no glue.
Scatter and objectives, the cheap way to fix a thin table - Munitorum Armoured Containers with their poseable doors are hard cover and objective markers in the same bag. Battlefield Armageddon: Galvanic Network is two rockcrete barricades, two pylons and a generator shrine; Capacitor Cluster is two shock arrays and two capacitor stacks. Both are push-fit.
Landmarks - Sector Mechanicus Sacristan Forgeshrine, fifty-four components of forge, floor, legs and tanks; Battlezone Fronteris: Landing Pad; the 165mm Autochoral Transmitter and the 135mm Thermoexchanger Shrine, both small enough to be an impulse buy and tall enough to break a line of sight; and Vox-Antenna and Auspex Shrine, two structures in one box.
For Kill Team specifically - the Equipment Pack is barricades, ladders and objective markers, and Killzone Upgrade: Tyranid Infestation is fifteen pieces of spore chimney, brood nest and capillary tower for dressing an existing board.
How to choose, in three lines
- No board and no terrain at all? Combat Patrol Terrain Set: Battlezone. It is the only box here whose contents work in every game you will ever play.
- A board already, and a table that plays too open? Sector Imperialis Ruins or Battlefield Armageddon: Manufactorum Ruins. Ruins fix a table faster than anything else, and buying two is still cheaper than any box above.
- Kill Team above all? Volkus if you also play 40k; Gallowdark if you want the game the boarding rules were written for; Bheta-Decima only once you own a table already.
Painting it, briefly
Terrain is the best painting practice in the hobby - enormous surface area, a low standard required, and every hour of it visible from across the room. Spray, drybrush, wash, done. Two rules do most of the work: keep the terrain quieter than the models, because a board painted in strong colours competes with the army standing on it, and paint the board and the scenery to the same palette, because a mismatch between them is the most visible fault on an otherwise good table.
Our drybrushing and washes and shades guides cover the two techniques that carry a whole board, and the basing guide covers the textures and pigments that finish the ground. If you are furnishing a Kill Team board specifically, the Kill Team terrain guide covers what the traits actually do in the rules.
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