Light Speed: Arena is a real-time, combat game.
Title: Light Speed: Arena
Year Published: 2025
Designer: Leonardo Alese, James Ernest, Tom Jolly, Emanuele Santellani
Publisher: Tablescope
Players: 2-4 (2-6 with expansions)
Game Time: ~15 minutes
Set-up Time: ~3 minutes
Ages: 8+
Theme: Space arena combat
Mechanisms: Real time, Tile Placement
How to win: Score points by damaging and destroying the opponents space ships and mining minerals from asteroids.
As the roar of the crowd resonates, the arena is lit with the brilliant glow of sponsor ads. 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.
How to play Light Speed: Arena
A quick and concise how to play video for Light Speed: Arena.
Main mechanisms
So it’s a real time game which is the obvious thing. Then, in real time you’re placing tiles which is technically tile placement but not really in the traditional sense.
USP
The USP is not the real time placement, but the app scanning the play area and scoring the game.
The same company that produces the app also includes a way to score Cascadia which would be something I’d like to try.
Theme
The theme of this being somewhat of a sport with sponsorships is fun, but is not explored enough in the rulebook.
Setup & Rulebook
Setup the arena and shuffle the spaceships, no issue.
The rulebook is small and covers everything very well.
Components & Artwork
The tiles are nice and chunky and the cartoon art is fun.
The app does a really good job and I’m yet to see it fail at all. Although, as a test I did submit a picture of my budgie rather than the game and it broke!
Ease of Teaching
It’s obviously easy to teach, people understand ‘pointing a laser beam will score points’.
Similar Games
This is a remake of 2003’s Light Speed, obviously without the app. It was also remade into Stellar Conflict in 2015, again, without an app.
4 Gods, which is a game I haven’t thought about for years is a real-time tile placement game that is quite good fun. It’s more like a fast Carcassonne.
Light Speed: Arena Review
Positives
A very quick and fun game.
The range of asteroid and player powers gives the game plenty of variability.
The real time scoring works well and prevents any fiddlyness.
There is a way to play the game wiithout the app…
Negatives
…but I don’t think that will bring around the people that don’t like apps in games.
It doesn’t (currently) have any way to play a campaign or league. I would love to play 3, 5 or 7 games back to back and have a way to score points over several games in the app.
Light Speed: Arena Round-Up
A very fun and quick playing game with a competant app that takes away the headache of scorign and keeps the game skipping a long at a fast pace.
Rating
I give it 8/10