Nearly two months since the Space Marines Codex v2.0 released, the Imperial Fists are finally here with a Codex Supplement of their own. Was it worth the wait? Are half the rules in the book weirdly obsessed with Buildings, a thing which has never been seen in 8th edition? How many times can a single boltgun hit an enemy model, anyway? All these questions and more will be answered in the following review. It’s worth noting right up the top here that the Imperial Fists book is a little different to the others, because it includes rules for their successor chapter, the Crimson Fists, as well. This has some slightly weird effects, some of which require an errata or FAQ, so when we reach them we’ll highlight them so you know what to look out for.

Army Rules

In addition to the faction rules laid out in Codex: Space Marines, Imperial Fists get some additional rules of their own. But before we dive into those, let’s cover what you need to do to get access to them. We’ve covered this before in our Ultramarines, White Scars, Raven Guard, and Iron Hands reviews, so if you already know this part, feel free to skip ahead – though things are a little different in this supplement, thanks to the presence of the Crimson Fists.

Accessing These Rules

For most of 8th edition, you’ve only technically gotten access to the full suite of subfaction (i.e. “Imperial Fists”) specific rules if your army has literally used the IMPERIAL FISTS keyword. Homebrew chapters could choose a trait, but wouldn’t get stratagem, trait or relic access (meaning that in tournaments people just used the main keywords).

That’s changed, and you can now get access to 95% of what’s in this book if you are a Imperial Fists successor chapter (90% if you are actually playing Imperial Fists). We broke those rules down in part 1 of our main book review, and importantly “successor chapters” in this case includes those using the “build your own” traits. If you’re going down-the-line Imperial Fists, this is the tactic you get:

The Imperial Fists gained hugely from the 2019 codex. They retained the good part of their original trait, ignoring cover, and swapped the completely irrelevant “re-roll wound rolls against Buildings” for “unmodified hit rolls of 6 on bolt weapons score 1 additional hit.” This is a great change – Imperial Fists units laying down bolter fire will score 1/6th more hits, which is decent enough on Intercessors and the like, but really nasty on high rate of fire units like Aggressors or Centurions.

Crimson Fists get a similar trait, sharing the “bolter drill” rule, but swapping the “ignores cover” part out for a modified version of their White Dwarf trait:

The big change here is going from “units with twice as many or more models” to “units with at least 5 more models.” This is a great change – it now makes more sense to take large squads in a Crimson Fists army, whereas the previous tactic pushed you hard towards MSU.

If you want to instead pick your own trait we’ll go through what we think the best successor combos are a bit later on. For now, we just need to establish that Successor chapters can get most (or in fact with CP expenditure, all) of what’s here, and keep that in mind until we cover them in detail. The breakdown of how to get these abilities is as follows (note: this is actually a little bit different to the other supplements thanks to the Crimson lads, so it’s worth checking out):