A fast card game of starship combat! Matching fleets of ships drop out of C+/warp/hyperspace around an asteroid, doing battle with each other while trying to mine the rock for precious metals.
CheapAss Games provides a line of games that are well thought out and playtested at a very reasonable price. They are able to do this by letting you, the players, provide the tokens and dice. This keeps their costs down, assuming (and rightly so) that their audience already has tons of dice and markers from many other games on their shelves.
Light Speed comes with a one page black and white instruction booklet and four sets of different colored cards for each fleet and two asteroid cards. The cards are of good quality and have held up after multiple playings. For play, you’ll need to provide around 30 or so tokens that represent either damage to ships or ore that is mined from the asteroid.
Your fleet includes 10 cards, ranging in speed from (you guessed it) 1 to 10. The slower the ship, the more powerful it’s weapons and defenses. Ships can have up to three types of weapons. These blasters/phasers/disruptors are colored white, red, and green; doing one, two or three points of damage. To withstand the assault of your enemy your ships have shields, that cover sections of the card, stopping all damage that it would receive. If you are unlucky enough to be hit, your ship has health points ranging from one to four. The slower ships have more health compared to the faster, less armed vessels. Once your vessel has taken it’s number of health in damage it is removed from the game.
The real action of the game comes in the initial deployment of your fleet. Once the asteroid is set in the middle of the playing area, each player shuffles his ten card fleet. The players then simultaneously begin to play face up cards on the table in a flurry. Once a card is played down, you can move it around the board, trying to angle your lasers and shields to best protect your fleet while destroy your enemy and mining the asteroid. After you have finished with a card, you can’t move it again.
Players deploy their ships as quickly as possible. When one player has finished with all ten of their ships the ‘Fast Round’ is over. The other players can choose to have the ship in their hand be played where it lies or not to use it at all. This is amazingly fun, and important, as fleets can come to the engagement with less ships if their player is slower or taking time to set up ‘the perfect shot’.
After dropping out of C+/warp/hyperspace, the battle begins. Combat is ordered based off the speed of the ships. All vessels at speed one fire simultaneously followed by speed two, and so on. To hit, all a ship must do is draw a line from the arc of fire from it’s weapon to any part of a ship that isn’t protected by shields.
Points are scored by two means. Either your lasers mine the asteroid, gaining points equal to the power of your laser, or from destroyed enemy ships. This becomes some of the fast paced laughing and woes as you watch your fleet be destroyed by the enemy and even more likely your own friendly fire!
The asteroid has 12 points worth of ore. Once gone the asteroid disappears. This leaves the players to gain points by destroying enemy ships. If by chance you destroy your own vessels, your enemy gains the points, and rightly so J After the last ships have fired all players count up how much ore you have mined from surviving ships, and the health points of enemy ships destroyed.
The game is fun and very, very fast! The slowest part of the system is conducting the combat, ensuring that all the ships fire and damage is recorded correctly. Even with up to four players a game usually lasts less than 10 minutes.
The only issue that could possibly be found is that the cards are very slick and easily move around a regular dinner table. The rules say that playing on a fabric will help though.
At $5.00, CheapAss provides a fun game that can be easily used while you’re waiting for the pizza to come :)
