I got to play my first game of Malifaux 2nd Edition last night. My opponent is an old hand at Malifaux and has been involved in the 2nd Edition beta test the entire time, so I'm reasonably sure that we got most of the rules right.

Overall, it was a much better experience than I was used to. Malifaux went from "kind of frustrating game, but the minis are pretty, and my buddy John really likes it, so I guess I'll play it from time to time" to "this game is interesting - I will explore it further." I can't put my finger on exactly why - my guess is that many of the rules tweaks were quite subtle - but the game had a lot more flow. It was a lot more intuitive and a lot more elegant. And, more importantly, I felt like my actions were more often successful than they had been in previous iterations of the game.

More specifically, I got to play Ramos...

Man, Ramos...

In the previous iteration, I felt like Ramos was the weakest part of his crew: slow-moving in a game that values getting to locations on the board and doing things, fragile in a game that prizes smart aggression, with powerful abilities that required he spend all his actions creating resources or sacrificing his pieces.

New Ramos is freaking incredible. He is the attrition/tempo master. Over the course of the game, my army grew and shrank, from as small as a totem and a few remaining spiders to a couple of spider swarms and four or five individual spiders. Ramos's ability to heal from dying constructs, create constructs directly out of scrap tokens, and sacrifice constructs to deal damage synergize amazingly with the spiders and spider swarms he loves to create - and their ability to eat other spiders and scrap tokens to heal themselves. I felt like I could put my opponent in the position where in chewing through my pieces, he was only helping me to become more powerful.

Ramos also gained a fascinating speed bump in the form of his Magnetic Hold spell, which allows him to damage a construct and drag himself towards it. Used aggressively by harming an opponent's constructs, Ramos can easily overcome his slow speed. Used defensively - possibly by harming my own constructs, which is fine because their deaths generally help Ramos along and are reversible anyway - it's a fascinating and tricksy tool.

The new Malifaux is a big hit with me... what about you? Anyone out there have any experience with it?