The Iron Hands, who are they? Don’t worry if you’ve forgotten – until recently, it seemed like Games Workshop had too. All that’s changed now though. Following the release of the recent Codex: Space Marines, the Iron Hands have a supplement of their very own, and a new plastic Primaris character to go with it (spoiler: you’re going to get sick of seeing this guy really fast). If you have a fedora in your closet and love talking about Pure Rational Thought, and/or cutting off bits and pieces of your body and replacing them with cybernetic limbs, then the Iron Hands are for you.

Army Rules

In addition to the faction rules laid out in Codex: Space Marines, Iron Hands 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 and White Scars reviews, so if you already know this part, feel free to skip ahead to “The Units” once you’ve read about the army core rules.

Accessing These Rules

For most of 8th edition, you’ve only technically gotten access to the full suite of subfaction (i.e. “Iron Hands”) specific rules if your army has literally used the IRON HANDS 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 an Iron Hands successor chapter. 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.

The Iron Hands Chapter Tactic got a massive overhaul in the new codex, giving them three separate benefits: The first is the ability to ignore wounds on a D6 roll of a 6+ (which they already had), which effectively gives additional wounds to the entire army and is better than it was before thanks to now applying to vehicles. The second (and new) ability gives them the ability to hit in Overwatch on a 5 or 6, and the third (also new) ability lets Iron Hands vehicles double their remaining wounds count when determining which profile to use. You might feel like these are strongly pushing Iron Hands toward the use of vehicles and, well, you’d be right. Check back for our Hammer of Math article on Monday where we’ll talk about just how resilent Iron Hands vehicles can be. Over the course of this review we’re going to see how the combination of powers and abilities that Iron Hands have access to, paired with the specific units that are affected by them, changes them from being an afterthought in the old codex to potentially the most powerful faction in the post-Marines meta.

You may decide that you want to look elsewhere from the main chapter tactic and be wondering whether these rules apply to you if you pick successor traits, and how you might best use them. 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.