When I was meeting with publishers at Gen Con this year, I stopped to chat with the folks at the Ares Games booth. They are best known for their amazing War of the Ring board game (among other things), but every now and then, they surprise me with a title out of the blue. This year, it was Light Speed Arena. When Roberto first started telling me about it, I was intrigued. While it did have a bit of a gimmick feel to it, I do love me some sci-fi games, so I figured it was worth checking out.

Light Speed Arena, is a real time game of spaceship battling. So fire up your reactors as we check this one out.

Gameplay Overview:

The goal in Light Speed Arena is to score the most points. You do this by shooting asteroids and other players’ ships. How do you do this? Good question. Each player starts the game with 8 or so ship tiles. Each ship has up to 3 guns (and maybe a shield).

You fire up the integrated app, and it calls out rounds with a 10-second timer. During the time, you have to position your ship on the table and face its guns towards what you want to shoot. When the time’s up, it’s hands off and the next round begins.

After all ships have been placed, you take a picture with the app and it scans everything. Then the app walks you though the scoring, round by round. It shows where each ship shoots and you click the screen to collect your points. After it goes through all rounds, it totals up the score and announces the winner.

The gameplay is quick and simple: Place ships and try to aim them properly.

Game Experience:

The future is here. Light Speed Arena caught me off guard with just how amazing it is. Both in the excitment of the gameplay and how fabulous the app is. I know there are some of you that hear “app-assisted game” and immediately nope out. If you are on that train, I can say that this app is very unintrusive and does the best thing an app can do: handles all the boring bookkeeping for me and let’s me just play the game.

After all the ships have been placed, the app will calculate your shots for you.

But I have a long-standing policy that if your game relies on a gimmick that gimmick better really work really well or your game falls apart. Well the gimmick here is the app handling the scoring and it’s fabulous. Once the game is done, you take a picture, it scans it, lets you double check that it got all the ships, and then proceeds to scoring. A few times I’ve had to retake a picture, but usually thats if my lighting is really crappy.

For those who are impatient, you do have the option of skipping the interactive scoring and just seeing who won, but you’d only pick that option if you hate fun. Having the app walk you through each round, show you shot-for-shot what each ship did, and letting you click the screen to collect your points is a hoot. Everyone I’ve played this with has had a great time sitting around the screen, collecting their points and mocking their opponent for a missed shot (even the app will mock you if you completely miss or blow up your own ship).

After all the ships have been placed, you snap a photo and it calculates everything for you.

But moving off the app for a bit, the gameplay itself is wonderful. You have 10 seconds to position your ship. You can also make that longer in the app if you want, but 10 seconds works well for me. You have to eyeball everything, so errant shots do happen. In fact, you have to hit the ship “art”, not just the tile. But there is even a layer of strategy to the gameplay as ships have an initiative value, and the lasers have a strength of 1-3 damage. So you not only have to be aware of when your ship is going to fire, but also how strong the shot will be.

There are times you plop down a ship, only to realize that it’s not going until initiative 8 and may actually be dead by the time it goes. Or other times you have the perfect shot lined up, but by the time you ship shoots, its target is already dead, and there is nothing there anymore. So the beam fires through the empty space and ends up hitting one of your own ships. Oops.

Finally, the game also has optional special powers. Both for each player’s base ship and also the asteroids. All you have to do is flip over the tile to the other side and the app will recognize when special powers are in play. These feature things like bonus points for long range shots or extra points for being near the asteroids. The powers integrate with the gameplay seamlessly and I actually like playing both with and without them.

The app even mocks you when you miss or hit your own ship.

Final Thoughts:

Just about everyone I’ve played Light Speed Arena with has had a ton of fun and asked to play it again immediately afterwards. The game only takes about 10 minutes, so it’s a perfect filler game. And for those of you on the app-hate train, the publisher does actually offer a “analog downgrade” kit, where you can completely skip the app and handle all the bookkeeping yourself. Frankly, this sounds like an awful way to play the game, as it adds on a layer of complexity and fiddliness for truly no reason.

Light Speed Arena is easily one of my favorite games of the year, and even months after Gen Con, this one regularly makes its way out to my gaming table. The app is remarkable (and super cool) and I look forward to seeing what this technology can do in the future with other games.,

Final Score: 5 Stars – The future is here, and I’m all for it.

Hits:
• Integrated app is phenomenal
• Fun gameplay with plenty of exciting moments
• Optional ship powers work well for variety

Misses:
• When you miss, the app will mock you. Oh wait, not that kind of miss…