[MIB 9966]

Got my copy to compare and the similarities to the older ruleset are close, but there are changes to the printed rules for the original game that impact many cards.

As Alex noted, Government and Communist is no longer attributes, so some cards now are unaligned, or have less interaction than before. Significantly, this affects the Discordian Society, which is now immune from attacks by Straight and Conservative groups.

The Media attribute is also interesting because while Media has no opposite, it gets an automatic +4 for attacks to Control or Destroy other Media groups, so it's unique beyond Criminal and Fanatic.

The rule to make sure that there is always at least 3 uncontrolled groups at the end of every turn helps greatly for those people to the left of the starting player, and it's nice to see that as an official rule in the base game.

Having playmats for each Illuminati and the summary on the back of them will make things go much smoother for new players (and now I don't have to keep making extra copies of that page to hand out to players to use when teaching/refreshing the rules). Big thanks for adding int he privileged attack rules there too. :)

Yes, the back of the cards are different, so the older expansion will stick out, but blended together to add Artifacts could be lots of fun. I do hope this version sells well enough to warrant the addition of Artifacts in an expansion.

It's different enough to warrant the second edition title, but I know many were hoping for a more revamped ruleset to align more with the good parts of INWO while keeping Illuminati itself true to its core, but we've run that series of arguments with no real consensus on how that merge could work yet.