Tabletop Game Experimentation! MicroBlast Starships

Every now and then my brain goes to work and the only way to silence it is to slap together an idea. Here we have MicroBlast Starships, a game for two players. Print the large sheet of eight cards and give each player one each of the attack, defense, and performance cards and one of the ship cards. When printed each card should be 2.5-inches wide by 3.5-inches tall. Each player will also need three dice — one four-sided die, one six-sided die, and one eight-sided die — and some tokens to track damage. You’ll want a tabletop to play on.

Building Your Ship

The attack, defense, and performance cards are placed in a row in front of each player, positioned left to right in the order the player chooses. The leftmost card uses the d4 slot, center card uses the d6 slot, and the rightmost card uses the d8 slot. Do not move these cards during the game.

In the below example, the player has selected performance as his d4 card, defense as his d6 card, and attack as his d8 card. During the game he will use the ruleblocks on each card as shown (the grayed out blocks are not available to the player this game).

Playing the Game

To start the game each player rolls his performance die and compares results. Player with the highest roll goes first. Tied? The youngest player goes first. Set the ships about two feet apart from each other to start the game.

On a player’s turn he moves and attacks.

• Move – Ships move in “card lengths” with the number of card lengths moved each turn based on the performance card’s position. d4 performance is one card length, d6 performance is two card lengths, and d8 is three card lengths. Ships may move to the side or straight ahead. Ships may also rotate left or right up to 45-degrees when they move. The below image gives you an idea of one card length of movement.

• Attack – To attack the other player you need to bounce your attack die off of your ship . . . and land as close to (or on) the opposing ship as possible. The target also rolls his defense die. Subtract the defense result from the attack result: the remaining number is the number of “hits” inflicted on the target (minimum of one). If the attack die lands on the target — any part of the die is laying on the target ship — the die result is doubled before defense is subtracted.

Winning the Game

And that is it! Alternate turns, moving and attacking, until only one ship remains. This is a very, very simple starship combat game and is more of an experimentation than a complete and polished game. Have fun with it, and feel free to leave me comments below or contact me if you want to share your feedback. I’ve no clue if I’ll ever do anything with this, but maybe some of you will find it goofy and simple fun.