Death Star Battles

Death star battles is a turn-based puzzle game. The game setup is an important factor in the game experience; there are 8 different customizable categories which make for a very high replay value: Number of players, number of human to cpu players, number of stations per player, cpu player difficulty/play style, single game or tournament, station size, number of planets, and map style (of which there are 22 vastly different options). The map is then generated and populated with the player's stations and space bodies (red giants, white dwarves, black holes, wormholes, supernovas, binary star systems, etc.) and play begins!

The player is then presented with two dials which can be adjusted: Power and angle; these refer the the famous death star beam which destroys other stations in a single hit (planets cannot be destroyed in this game). Interacting with these two settings is a gravity mechanic. The gravity is invisible to the player until a shot is fired and the trajectory observed; it also widely varies from body to body (black holes cannot even be seen themselves, but greatly affect a shot's trajectory within a certain proximity). This becomes extremely interesting when there is a complex space system like on involving wormholes, white holes and hyperspace nodes. The first shot is literally a 'shot in the dark' to test the physics of your environment. After that, you can get a read o the gravitational power of the bodies in the map and make subsequent decisions based on this. There is also a hyperspace button which sacrifices your turn's shot for a random re-placement of your station within the map.

Although Death Star Battles can be slow at first (due to the nature of any turn-based game), I found this game to be very entertaining. The simplicity of the 2 options (power and angle) corroborated to create quite a complex set of shot possibilities, and when combined with the unknown gravity exponent of various space bodies it becomes very fun, often unpredictable and suspenseful (the shots can actually continue off-screen, while still interacting with gravity systems, and then return to screen and destroy a station) Game customization is an excellent feature in terms of replay value. Recommended for both reference and enjoyment.