Light Speed: Arena

Light Speed: Arena is a real-time game of ship-flying, tile-laying, combat, explosions and space-mining that is even crazier than this sentence makes it sound. At the same time, it’s incredibly simple to play: place spaceship tiles on the table for about a minute, and let the app figure out who blows up whom.

In more detail, the game allows you to set up a large play space by supplying cardboard corners – imagine the edges yourself. Each player places a spacebase along ‘their’ side of the board, and gets a bunch of spaceship tiles – 8 for two players, with fewer for three or four – that you shuffle into a random pile. Start the timer on the app, and away you go: flip the top spaceship tile and place it anywhere in the play area, as long as it doesn’t overlap with anything else. Each spaceship has at least two weapons, and what you’re trying to do is either target the asteroids (mining for points) or the other players’ base or ships (dealing damage for points!)

This continues with ten seconds for each new tile, and everyone placing at the same time. Once that’s done, the magic of computers comes to the fore: in the app, take a picture of the play area from above. The app will now work out which ship is shooting what, and resolve them all in number order: yes, although there ship placement has a randomness to how they come out, they all resolve in ascending order. The app will track what they’ve mined, what damage they’ve dealt – and taken: each ship can only take so much before exploding, although some of them do have limited shielding. The catch with the resolution phase here is that any points a ship has harvested will be lost if that ship itself doesn’t survive until the end of the road! Players will also get points if their base survives – this is frankly unlikely – and then the player with the most points wins the game.

You can swap out the basic asteroids and have the ‘sponsored’ asteroids instead, each of which add a new dynamic to the game without changing the basic principles of play. You can also house-rule any number of things such as the size of play area, number of rounds – the default game is a single round – and so on. If you’re pushed for time you can even skip past the resolution phase and have the app calculate points without showing how they were won, but watching each ship do its thing on the small screen feels like part of the fun: a chaotic epic in miniature.