I just noticed that Blizzard recently replaced the Starcraft II Trial with a Starter Edition. Basically it lets you play Starcraft II for free, after you downloaded the huge game client.

Basically it's a limited version of Starcraft II where there are the following restrictions (Quoted from their site): "Starter Edition players can only play up to the fourth campaign mission, and most Challenge Missions are unavailable. Starter Edition players are also unable to use versus and co-op matchmaking, most custom maps, chat channels, and the party system. Publishing custom maps to Battle.net is also restricted, and offline play is unavailable to Starter Edition players. For single-player and custom games, Starter Edition players may only choose the Terran race."

However, the cool thing is that you can still play multiplayer against random people and most importantly, there's no trial time period, so it won't expire.

Despite the limitations and not being able to use parties/friend lists, I thought I would share this here in case some people ever thought about trying Starcraft II but did not want to buy it yet.

Here's the link: https://us.battle.net/account/sc2/starter-edition/

Available maps
Xel’Naga Caverns - max 2 player
Shattered Temple - max 4 player
Discord IV - max 4 player
High Orbit - max 4 player

Oh nice

Hmm, interesting. I would download and play it, but I've got too many new games to fill up my time with right now

Interesting. I'll have to give this a try.

yeah it would be nice.

By the way it seems we can still add friends, just not create parties.

I thought it was going to be a rickroll as well

I left the computer running overnight to finish the download. Totally worth it I think.

I don't remember if it is. I know we cannot create parties but we can possibly still do the old Brood War trick of chatting on IRC telling each others which game to join then quickly trying to join the same game lobby. That could be challenging, though.

I'll PM you my gamertag/code.