On 2" Ruins

I’ve seen an idea floating around that the 2” ruins on GW layouts have a special rule that vehicles are never allowed to set-up or end a movement on them. I cannot find anywhere that this is supported by the rules so I consider a house-rule. Here is some information about how these ruins work.

What do the blue ruins mean?

The Chapter Approved tournament guide has a section on terrain layouts. First, they describe their lyouts as purely guidelines. It’s up to each event to interpret rules however they wish. Here’s how they describe it.

The following layouts primarily use the Ruins terrain feature. This efficiently achieves a good amount of line-of-sight blockage and cover appropriate for balanced games, thanks to the natural abstraction of line of sight within the rules for Ruins. Remember that a variety of terrain heights not only adds to the immersive nature of the battlefield, but is also important for line of sight and rules such as Plunging Fire. For organisers and players with a more robust terrain collection (especially elements that block true line of sight), incorporating features such as Woods, Barricades and Hills into your chosen layouts is perfectly acceptable.

Then they go on to explain what the ruins mean. Gray areas are “More than 4in” and the blue areas are “2in or less”.

For model mobility purposes, we have shaded the area terrain outlines in the above colours to show our recommendations for how tall the terrain should be in each section.

[…]

These height and Ruin placement guidelines help provide a balanced tournament experience; as organisers you are free to adjust this to suit your terrain collection.

That’s it. Nothing special about the blue ruins except that they should be 2” or less in height. Basically that hits the cut-off that those terrain features do not have to be accounted for during movement.

There are various other parts of the rules that cover ruins, but those are for ruins in general and don’t say anything about differing heights of ruins. You can find it in the core rules section Terrain Features -> Ruins. The Rules Commentary has some more detailed explanation of how line of sight works through, in and out of ruins. The word “ruin” doesn’t even occur in the official FAQ. I don’t see any information about this in the WTC FAQ. I have been unable to find any large-scale ITC FAQ since that was taken over by GW and is therefore presumed replaced by the GW FAQ.

In short, blue ruins are just ruins like anything else. The ground floor acts just like the ground floor of other ruins. The terrain acts just like terrain in other ruins so models can overlap the terrain and the footprint as long as they wouldn’t intersect with the physical terrain.

Tournament Exceptions

A common exception is to treat all walls in ruins as if they were infinitely tall. This means that a model cannot be set up such that it would overhang any wall. These tournaments often do not place any walls in the 2” ruin areas because those are meant to never be over 2” tall.

Some examples

So there is nothing that prevents vehicles from being inside those ruins. Let’s find some examples from prominent streams with very experienced players!

LVO 2025

These games were cast on Wargames Live. In addition to the ever-present Joe, they have a guest commentator in the form of Jack Harpster from Art of War. The games were also (usually?) observed by a judge. These people have seen a lot of events.

Here’s an example from Round 1 on Layout 1 where John Kilcommons charges a Sky Ray Gunship into a small 2” ruin to engage Michael Hoopeer’s Demon Spawn on the other side. It’s actually a very interesting case because John is able to engage the Spawn through the ruin by being within 1” engagement range. He rolled low enough that he does not have to go around and fully base-to-base which would have opened him up to a heroic intervention.

Here’s another example from Round 3 on Layout 1 where Durante Bozzini moves his Ghostkeel (a walker vehicle) into the 2” ruins on the side in order to get better angles.

Here in Round 4 on Layout 4, Forrest Phanton moves his Land Raider into a blue ruin in corner before disembarking, with a judge watching over his shoulder. If you watch until 10:33:00 Joe makes a comment about it.

They just talked about it, Andrew. So vehicles can fit on the footprint, they just can’t stand on top of the wall. It’s a pretty standard interpretation on the GW layouts, I think. Sometimes they’re crates though, so there’s not a lot of room to stand on those things.