Players: 2-4
Time: 5-15 minutes
Difficulty: 2 (of 10)

The Components

Light Speed comes in a small plastic baggy with just two components: a set of cards and a rulesheet.

Cards: There are 42 cards in the set, all printed 4-color on the front and grayscale on the back. They’re slightly glossy, square-cornered, and printed on a somewhat sturdy cardstock.

Two of the cards are asteroids, printed front and back with big rocks and the word "asteroid".

The other 40 cards depict 4 teams of 10 ships each. Each of the teams is color-coded (red, green, purple, and blue), but otherwise the teams are identical. Each card very cleanly depicts a variety of information about a spaceship: speed (one each of 1-10); ship name; ship health; and shields (marked by clear, double-lines along some of the sides). Each card also shows a ship with 1 or more lasers jetting out of it. The lasers come in 3 varieties, thin white, medium red, and thick green-and-white, which are quite easy to tell apart during play.

Overall the cards are well-designed and it's easy to very quickly understand the information--which is vital considering the speed of the game.

Rulesheet: The rulesheet is a 4-panel, double-sided sheet printed in black and white. The rules are simply explained, and there's also one example of a battle, which is fairly crucial for understanding (though the exemplar picture is a little murky).

Other Components: You'll also need about 15 damage markers for each player and 12-20 rock counters, none of which come with the game. I used Cheapass microchips for the ships, though the colors didn't match exactly, and then pennies to mark the rocks. Cheapass' stones would probably have worked better, because I could have matched the colors one-for-one and also had a fifth color for the rocks, but they're a little heavier and less portable than the microchips.

Given the game's cheapass price, the full color cards with attractive artwork was considerably more than I expected. The cards look quite beautiful when all laid out on the table. The intuitive design is also well done. Thus I give it an above average "4" out of "5" for Style.

The Gameplay

After setup, Light Speed is played in two rounds: the fast round and the scoring round.

Setup: During setup the asteroid is placed in the middle of the table (or perhaps two asteroids are; we found this works much better for four players). 12 rock counters are put on the asteroid (or as many as 20 are divided between the two asteroids). Each player shuffles his deck of 10 spaceship cards.

Fast Round: During the fast round each player drops his spaceships onto the table in real-time. As soon as one player has dropped all his ships, the round ends. Any players with a ship in their hands may drop it where it is.

The general idea here is to drop your ships with lasers pointed toward other ships or the asteroid and with shields pointed toward incoming lasers--but how much you'll be able to actually strategize depends on the speed of your opponents.

Scoring Round: Now begins the scoring. Each ship fires its lasers in order of speed, going from 1 to 10. All ships of the same speed go simultaneously.

There are three types of lasers, each doing a different amount of damage: 1 for the white; 2 for the red; and 3 for the green. Because the lasers are different sizes, this is very intuitive. For each ship you need to run straight lines to see what each laser hits. (The rules suggest a straight edge or a rubber band, but we typically eyeballed them from table level.)

If a laser strikes the asteroid it mines that number of rock counters (if there are counters left), and the player places them on his ship.

If a laser strikes another ship in the shield, nothing happens.

if a laser strikes another ship not in the shield it does that number of points of damage to the ship, which has between 1 and 4 health to start with. If the ship isn't destroyed, the attacking player places that many damage chips of his color on his target.

When a ship is destroyed, it goes to the player with the most damage counters on it. In case of a tie, no one gets the ship--unless one of the folks tied in damage counters was also the owner of the ship in which case he gets it (this is not a good thing). Any rock counters that were on a destroyed ship are gone.

If a ship is destroyed before it can shoot, tough luck. This is why you want your fast ships shooting at slow ships. After all the ships are done up to speed 10, the scoring round is over.

Winning the Game: At this point each player gathers together all his surviving rock counters and then adds up the health points of all the ships he destroyed. He then subtracts the health point value of any ofhis own ships he destroyed. This gives him his total score; highest scorer wins.

Game Variants

As I hear the story, this game was originally designed by Tom Jolly as a turn-based game, presumably with each player laying down one card at a time, carefully measuring shields and lasers against what's already on the table. James Ernest then made the game real-time, to, I think, its general improvement.

However, if you would like a more seriously strategic game, and you want to spend an hour rather than ten minutes, you could revert to the turn-based rules, and see how the game works.

Relationships to Other Games

The Light Speed space ships are also featured in the Diceland: Extra Space supplement for the Diceland: Space game. If you want to engage in space combat with your old favorites, but using a totally different game system, go there.

The Game Design

All of my thoughts about what makes the game design of Light Speed good are very concise. It's a very innovative, perhaps unique idea for a game. It plays very quickly and is both tense and fun. It's quite easy to learn. There's also a lot of strategy possible and a very nice balance between speed and strategy.

I only have one complaint:

Fastest Player Controls Game: The fastest player totally controls the game, because other players have to go at a similar speed or get left behind. This means that if the fastest player decides to just drop all his cards on the table willy-nilly, there won't be any strategy possible. This wasn't too big an issue in our playtests, though it was at least a noticable element. If it became a larger problem I'd suggest an alternative rule where the fast round only ended after the second player dropped all his cards (for 3 or more players, at least).

I'm somewhat hesitant to give such a fast and simple game a perfect rating for gameplay, but honestly Light Speed deserves it for innovation, for tightness of rules, and for pure fun, thus I rate it a perfect "5" out of "5" for Substance.

Conclusion

I think Light Speed is a classic in the making. Unless you're a super serious strategy-only hard core gamer, there's no excuse not to pay the $5 to pick this up.