This one HURTS. I LOVE the 1st edition. It's probably one of my all time favorite settings, and the system worked great. I usually lean for lighter systems, but for swashbuckling, I loved the in depth dueling system. It's not perfect, but it's darn close.

The Second Edition dumps so much of what I liked, and just fell flat for me. The system is far more abstract, and yet less mechanically sound (or so it seems, I could never get people to play this one, where I have a few years of running the first edition.) So many of the major conflicts I loved getting into have been resolved, and so are gone or reduced (the Fae are less menacing, the Vendel/Vesten conflict is gone, the War of the Cross is mostly cleaned up, Montaigne's War against Castille is over,) and while they delve into lots of characters, they just are less interesting than the older versions for the most part.

The Sarmatian Commonwealth is a FANTASTIC addition to the setting.

So in the end this was a deep and painful disappointment. At least the art is really good, and you can put the Commonwealth into the first ed setting pretty easily, I just need to come up with some sword fighting schools for them.

The core ideas make for a nice, light, mecha game, packed down to a 6 page rulebook. The game could use some scenerios, but is worth the cost. One rules problem, what is the cost of non mecha troops? They are stat blocked and treated like mecha (but can't brawl,) but there is no cost listed for them and they don't fit in the mecha construction rules. As someone with lots of A&A Minis, I would love to have them fight my mechs.

Also if someone could make a excel sheet to make mechs, that would be AWESOME.