It wasn’t enough for Games Workshop to just release a new Codex for Space Marines; they had to go and release half a dozen Codex Supplements covering major chapters. The first among these, and a complete no-brainer as a release, is Codex: Ultramarines. Having originally been given their own Codex to act as “the default” for Space Marines in second edition Warhammer 40k, for the past five editions the Ultramarines have been part of the standard Space Marines Codex. During that time, they’ve accumulated half a dozen of their own special characters and a few custom units, and moreso than any other codex chapter, so it makes sense for them to finally have their own supplement.

And it’s a hell of a supplement! With a strong array of special characters, custom powers, a strong chapter trait, and good relics, the Ultramarines look like they’ll be one of the most powerful ways to play Space Marines. While the White Scars have some exceptionally strong abilities focused on a specific playstyle, the Ultramarines bring tools to the table that will ehnahce almost any strategy, meaning we’re likely to see them out in force as the first point of call for many Marine armies.

If you missed our review of Codex: Space Marines, you can find part 1 of the review here.

Army Rules

In addition to the faction rules laid out in Codex: Space Marines, Ultramarines 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.

Accessing These Rules

For most of 8th edition, you’ve only technically gotten access to the full suite of subfaction (i.e. “Ultramarines”) specific rules if your army has literally used the ULTRAMARINES 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 Ultramarines 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 Ultramarines Chapter Tactic is wholly unchanged. The ability to Fall Back and still shoot (albeit at a -1 to hit penalty) is quite powerful, and extending it to vehicles will surely be useful for those that want to run legacy vehicles like the Land Raider and now no longer have to worry about those vehicles losing a turn to being charged. If you are willing to run Guilliman in a Supreme Command or Superheavy (not aux) detachment, even he benefits from it. Lastly, there are are a few ways now to avoid the -1 to hit penalty when shooting after falling back, which can lead to some hilarious situations where a Leviathan falls back and then unloads 20 storm cannon shots at BS2.

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. N.B. This is exactly the same as in our White Scars review, so if you’ve already read that you can skip past.