Light Speed Arena

• Designer: James Ernest, Tom Jolly, Leonardo Alese, Emanuele Santellani
• Publisher: Pegasus Spiele
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 8+
• Time: 5-10 min
• Amazon affiliate link: 
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

A real-time tabletop shooter in which you aim with your tiles and take a smartphone picture to let the app unfold the battle for you. As the roar of the crowd resonates, the arena is lit with the brilliant glow of sponsor ads: Pick your faction and step into battle. Tactically place and orient your spaceships to score the most points by taking down enemy vehicles, collecting mineral units from asteroids, and impressing the game sponsors.

This is a real-time, tile laying game. The game begins with two tiles in the center and starting the timer. Every round, each player places one spaceship anywhere on the battlefield while everybody else is doing the same! Aim at enemies and asteroids, while appealing to the sponsors and avoiding friendly fire. After 8 rounds, players stop and take a photo with the companion app. The companion app will play the battle for you and calculate the scores. Scores can also be calculated manually with the Downgrade Pack.

To set up, place the corner tiles on your table to mark the boundary of the play area, the rules recommend a 30 inch square. Each player gets a faction, and place the base tile of their faction on the table about 4 inches from an edge.  2 Asteroids are placed near the center.

Place a smartphone which has the game app on it on the table and start the game.  The app will now go through a set of 10 second timers; in each 10 second phase, players flip over the top spaceship from their stack and then place it somewhere in the play area.  

When the game is over (and all the spaceship tokens are placed), use the app to take a picture of the table and then the app will play out the battle and score the game.  Each spaceship has a number on it, and the lowest numbered ships fire first.  Ships also have different color laser beams (red = 3 damage, yellow = 2 damage, green = 1 damage).  Each ship has a hit point total noted by the number of batteries shown on the ship.  

If a ship is destroyed, the player who inflicted the most damage will score a number of points equal to the battery count of the destroyed ship.  If you hit an asteroid, you can extract mineral units from it, and these will score points at the end of the game.  Finally, if your base survives, you will score 4 points. 

Once you have played the base game enough, you can add in special asteroids that each give their own unique rule to the game or you can play with asymmetric faction powers.

My thoughts on the game

Light Speed was amongst the first games that I owned as I remember the little Cheapass envelope games as some of the very first in my collection.  Do I remember the game? Honestly, not really – so I guess it’s no Button Men nor Kill Doctor Lucky.

In any event, it’s a clever little game where you have to tactically place your ships on the table.  Of course, there is some significant time pressure involved as that ten second timer really goes quick.  Additionally, as you can’t predict the order of the ships early on – it’s hard to really come up with a cohesive plan from the start… And, when you get to the bottom of the stack, you might be able to deduce/remember what you have left, but honestly, the time pressure is such that your brain probably won’t register it.

In the original version, you had to score the game by hand – which sounds a bit tedious – but it gave you something to do.  One of the folks I’ve played this new version with remembered the original game and laughed about how it used to take way longer to score the game than to play it.

In the new version, you just run the associated app – it manages the timer so that everyone has their hands free to place their spaceships.  And then after all the ships are placed, you simply use the camera to take a photo of the table, and the dang thing scores it for you.

You do get to watch a nice video of the space battle, though you do have to click the screen each time anything happens. While it’s nice to be able to confirm the action, I really just want to sit back and watch the carnage happen and then have scores up on the screen at the end of it all.

Using the app definitely makes the resolution part of the game easier, but it also takes out some of (well all of) the interaction.  I could imagine there would at least be some fun getting to trace out the different laserbeams from your ships, seeing if they hit targets, arguing with your opponents if they really hit targets or not, getting to make neat sound effects with each shot and booming explosion noises too…

Here, there is just a bunch of tapping on the screen and watching the battle.  Longtime readers of the blog are probably well familiar with my reluctance to play games that are overly app dependent, and as you might expect, this game falls in that same pot.

In one way, I can see that it’s so much easier to resolve the battle using the app, and frankly, the technology behind it is quite neat.  But, for me, it doesn’t feel like a board game.  Of course, I’m old fashioned and likely not in the majority in my opinion on that.   In the vein of “this meeting could have been an email” (yes, I’m that kinda person too), this game could/should have been an app.

If you’re not bothered by the reliance on electronic processing, Light Speed Arena gives you a super fast game where you’re frantically active for 60-80 seconds (you get to place 6 to 8 ships based on player count).  The games can be changed up a bit with the special player powers as well as asteroid powers, and the app also makes the resolution of these added effects quite easy.  For those that fondly remember Cheapass Games, this is also a nice walk down memory lane.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Matt C: I also enjoyed the Cheapass version back in the day. It may have been my most-played Cheapass game. It’s still around somewhere in my collection. As for fun real-time games it is near the top of my list. I got a chance to check out the print & play version of Light Speed a couple years back and the auto-resolution via a photo was pretty cool. It didn’t dampen my enjoyment to have it use an app and I did not miss the physical scoring much. I’m not particularly anti-app when I feel it contributes something and this is just fine. From Dale’s review, I’m surprised that the game doesn’t allow a way for people to resolve things “by hand” if they want. My PNP version was only for two players and I think 4 players would bring more fun chaos. I see the game as a goofy fast-playing chaos fest and the fact that an app can score it (almost) as fast as it takes to play is a huge bonus. If the scoring took too long, I think it might make the game outstay its welcome. As it is, playing a couple games of this in a row is a fun activity before, between, or after another deeper game.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it! Alan H,
• I like it.  Matt C.
• Neutral. John P, Dale Y
• Not for me…