Astromachia

This is a pretty cool game; I admire (and have a great deal of empathy for) the design goals of this game. One of the very few games to make an attempt at a playable 3-D vector movement game, the 3-D aspect is a bit underplayed, and the limited command system is interesting.

A decent attempt at 3D newtonian movement without going the full "AV:T hog". It uses just the 6 cardinal directions in 3D NESWUD, thus avoiding messy vector consolidation. However, by allowing ship rotation about all three axes, that does allow 24 orientations! The effect of inertia is handled intuitively and automatically (dare I say painlessly). Also, for those to whom Pythagoras is "hard maths" there's a very clever lookup table to find 3D distances, or indeed a "Manhattan" distance option for the true cowards!

The interactive play mechanic (alternate actions) works excellently well and means no-one gets bored.

The detailed ship structure allows a gratifyingly realistic damage model and the opportunity for in-battle repair. There are also a natty set of ship design rules hidden in there too! These are not for the faint hearted, but allow varied and interesting ship design (I've created a spreadsheet to help!)

I've upped this to a 9 after "refereeing" two very enjoyable games between senior members of the school games club.