Light Speed Arena
- Board's Eye View
- 13 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Tho' none are Luddites and many of us are partial to the occasional video game, many of the Board's Eye View team voice a natural resistance to hybrid games where a board game requires a computer or phone app to play. Our plays in the past of Lucky Duck's various Destinies games have elicited mixed emotions, tho' there has generally been a positive response to board game apps that take over potentially tiresome book-keeping; for example, Fantasy Flight Games' Journeys in Middle-Earth. It was with some trepidation then that we approached Light Speed Arena; a game from Pegasus Spiele that's designed by James Ernest, Tom Jolly, Leonardo Alese and Emanuele Santellani to be played with a smartphone running the free-to-download companion app.
Light Speed Arena is a quick-to-play real-time game where the 1-4 players are placing out tiles representing their spaceships. The tiles all show laser weapons firing in various directions and when all the players have placed their cards you follow the lines of each laser to work out which spaceships have hit others and which have taken hits, and how much damage has been done. And that's where the app comes in: you just take a photo of the montage with which you've ended up and the app then does all the work measuring each laser's vectors and working out what's been hit. There are no arguments about what order to take to work out the damage - the app does it all. It's a classic example of an app doing the grunt work and leaving the players to enjoy the game.
The first few times you play you'll want to enjoy the light show of all the lasers firing and racking up their hits and misses but once you've had your fill of that you can just fast forward to the results. Again, it's an excellent example of an essential but unobtrusive app.
So what's the game like? It's fast and fun. And, yes, it's frustrating too because you've no protection from friendly fire! It's not unusual to find a stray laser has missed an intended target and instead smashed devastatingly into one of your own ships. The game is intended to be fast and furious in space, played using a strict timer to avoid any slowcoach dithering over placement, so games typically take no more than around 10 minutes. Expect tho' to field demands for an immediate re-match from space commanders mourning the loss of their entire fleet.
