It is a quintessential Cheapass Game (in their ‘Hip Pocket’ line). It comes in a little zip-lock bag, with the cards and the rules, and that’s it. The cards are actually nicely drawn in colour, with some good artwork depicting the ships.
The game itself is a space battle for mineral deposits on an asteroid (or two). To play the game, you will need a whole bunch of coloured beads, to depict damage to your ships, and ores that you have mined from the asteroid.
Each player (up to four) gets a deck of ten identical ships (bar the colour, so you can tell who is who). Each card has a picture of the ship on it, along with it’s name, a number from one to ten, some red dots showing how much damage it can take, lines of fire, and shields along some (or none) of the edges.
The asteroid card is placed in the middle of the table, with fifteen mineral beads on it (for an alternate set-up, you can place two asteroids with eight beads each, or flip both asteroid cards over to form one big asteroid … whatever works for you). Each player takes his deck of ships (shuffled) in one hand, and readies himself for play. When the word is given, each player can play as fast as he likes, taking the top card of his deck and placing it anywhere on the table. The players keep doing this until one person has played all of his cards, and shouts “stop”. The scoring then begins. Which usually takes longer than the game play…
Look for the ships numbered one on the table. These are the smallest, more fragile and faster ships, and they fire first. You then progress through each number in turn, until you get to the ‘ten’ ships – the bigger, heavier-armed and -shielded ships.
The lines of fire and shields on the ship cards are the important bits. Basically, each weapon on each ship (the smallest have one small weapon firing forwards, the largest have four weapons, firing in all directions) has a straight line drawn from it to the edge of the card. Once the cards have all been played, each line of fire needs to be extended from the edge of the card, until it either hits something or misses everything. The rules suggest stretching out a rubber band along the line – using it’s shadow to avoid moving the cards in the meantime.
If the line of fire intersects with another ship, check to see if there is a shield along the edge at which the line hit. If there is a shield in the way, nothing happened. Otherwise, the shot does one, two or three damage (indicated by the ‘strength’ of the shot – a line is either very thin, thick, or very thick and green). You place the indicated number of hits on the ship (whether it is friendly or enemy – so place your ships carefully!) or, if you hit the asteroid, ‘mine’ that many chunks of ore from it, taking the counters off the asteroid and placing them on the mining ship.
If you destroyed a ship, remove it from play. This means that the bigger ships that do more damage, and are consequently slower, may not actually get to fire, because they are destroyed by the faster ships that go first.
Your score equals the number of mined chunks from the asteroid on surviving ships, plus the number of ‘red dots’ (i.e. damage capacity) on destroyed enemy ships.
The rules are simple, easy to explain, and fast. There isn’t much room for misinterpretation here, which is good for a real-time game. Unlike other real-time games from Cheapass (e.g. Brawl and Falling), this isn’t as frantic as you’d expect. In fact, one of the flaws in the game can lead to turn paralysis – something I’ve certainly never seen before in a fast and furious real-time space combat game! Basically, you can reach a point in the game where each player has one card in their hand that they are trying to position on the table, but neither one wants to commit until the other player finishes his ship placement. You end up with the players endlessly sliding the cards round the playing field, trying to outguess their opponent.
But the play is actually fairly sedate – mainly because if you place your ships badly, you will end up shooting your own forces out of the sky and giving your opponent more points. Having said that, not having all of your ships on the table can be quite a handicap – so don’t take too long to figure out where to best place your cards.
All in all, I think the game is excellent – very easy and, well, cheap. The design is almost elegant, with everything you need to know cleanly and clearly placed on the ship cards. The simple system uses lines of fire, angles, shields, damage markers, mineral deposits … it packs a whole lot of bang into such a small package.
The cards are very nice; that artwork is great, and it is easy to see what does what in the whole lot. My only other gripe is that the cards have pointed corners. When you are trying to slide you ship across the table to the premium position (a card is not considered ‘played’ until you release your hold from it), the corners constantly catch on the tablecloth (which you need to use for real-time card games to stop them sliding on their own accord). I would have been much more satisfied paying a little more for rounded corners in this instance.
But all in all, it is a fast and furious filler game – each round takes about a minute (complete with scoring), and you can easily play a whole sequence of games while waiting for the latecomers...
