So which is better in your opinion? The 2nd edition or the 3rd?

The big differences are probably the TI theme on the 2nd and the toonish theme on the 3rd, some revised alien powers on the 3rd. All ships from the same class have similar specs on the 3rd, some new cards on the 3rd and omission of the ship upgrades from the 2nd, and of course the minesweeper and asteroid fields on the 3rd. So which one is better?

I have the 2nd ed and as a TI3 player I love the Twilight theme and do not want to switch to the 3rd edition.

Well, I'm committing a cardinal sin of Forum posting and ressurrecting an old post.

BUT, when the third edition was announced, it made me realize I had lost a few cards from my first edition and I could only do one thing.  Buy the second edition before third came out and made second harder to find.

I LOVE the artwork of 1E and 2E, and using Kovalic for 3E just felt like a major mistake to me.  So I guess the point is...If you want more humour, go 3E, if you like the idea of it being a more "serious" game (as serious as it can be, anyway), go 2E.

3rd edition looks funny and plays as the previous both editions, but does not bring the feeling & atmosphere of my 1st and 2nd edition games. 

Well, we lost the Twilight Imperium theme, but they have make some adjustment to race, ships and rules that make it a worthy acquisition.

It is even a better acquisition if you want to introduce a son or nephew to gaming, can even draft the whole family to a game or two.

Tawnos76 said:

100% agree, much prefer the 2nd edition I have.  Feels less like Munchkin.

I only have the 3rd edition. I can tell you that the new sillier artwork is why I bought the game. Much more friendly to a wife and 13 year old daughter.

There are slight rule changes, but some of them can be adopted into 2E.

One of my favourites is drawing 6 ships to start instead of 4 and throwing out any 2 you like.  This helps remove some of the enormous gaps between players that can occur at the beginning of games.  Although I have still seen people manage to pick up 4 scouts, and end up with 2 scouts to start haha.

Wow go me for not being in the here and now. I did not even know a second and third edition had come out. When I was fresh out of high school I found the original mag blast and well had a blast playing (no pun intended). It had a nice realistic art scheme which I did love and I also loved the diamond layout and style of attack, however it did seem odd for such art to be used in a game where you had to call your attacks. So my friends always treated it with little respect. In essence we played the game as if it were munchkin.  Memories of playing the one damage one weapon scout ship out on the field always resulted in people saying "DINK" when it fired on another vessel. Other moments of note were unenthused monotone attacks or Batman sound efects such as pow, bam, whapo, kablamo, etc.

Seems the art just caught up with the player's sentiments over the rules. Looks like I might have to snag me a new deck if some needed changes came about. Am I really getting that old already? lol...

Although I was originally skeptical of 3rd edition with its cartoonish artwork, I really feel it better capture the feeling of the game.  True it is an awesome space combat game, but when one of the rules is that you have to make sound effects, it loses any seriousness.  I remember playing 2nd edition and always laughing a lot when playing the game, and once I got 3rd, I felt the cartoons worked better than thought.  Of course to each his own.

 I think the third is better. Kovalic did great.