Astro Wars was an electronic table top game

Handheld electronic game

----Handheld electronic games are very small, portable devices for playing interactive electronic games, often miniaturized versions of video games. The controls, display and speakers are all part of a single unit. Rather than a general-purpose screen made up of a grid of small pixels, they...

 made in Great Britain in 1981 by Grandstand

Grandstand (game manufacturer)

Grandstand was a video game console and electronic game manufacturer and distributor. It was based in the United Kingdom and New Zealand and was active in the 1970s and 1980s.-Overview:...

 under licence from Epoch Co.

Epoch Co.

Epoch Co., Ltd. is a Japanese toy and computer games company founded in 1958 which is best known for manufacturing Barcode Battler and Doraemon video games...

. There are two versions of Astro Wars - an earlier version had the Astro Wars motif printed in red and a later version printed in white (as per the photograph).

Overview

Astro Wars was a shoot 'em up

Shoot 'em up

Shoot 'em up is a subgenre of shooter video games. In a shoot 'em up, the player controls a lone character, often in a spacecraft or aircraft, shooting large numbers of enemies while dodging their attacks. The genre in turn encompasses various types or subgenres and critics differ on exactly what...

, with play involving four phases of dodging enemy missiles and firing back at the squadrons of alien command ships, warships and attacking fighters as well as a docking challenge for additional bonus points.

Hardware

The Astro Wars game runs on six volts DC and can be powered by four 'C' type batteries or alternatively via a low voltage mains adaptor (not supplied with the game). As the display is based on VFD

Vacuum fluorescent display

A vacuum fluorescent display is a display device used commonly on consumer-electronics equipment such as video cassette recorders, car radios, and microwave ovens. Invented in Japan in 1967, the displays became common on calculators and other consumer electronics devices...

 technology, it allows bright, multicoloured in-game elements to be rendered but at the cost of a relatively small screen size. The VFD display is manufactured with the pre-formed, immutable in-game objects effectively fixed in place onto a dark background. Each element can be individually lit or unlit during play, giving the illusion of animation and movement. In-game objects cannot touch or superimpose on one another. The screen was slightly magnified to improve the size of the gameplay.

Gameplay

In concept Astro Wars has similar themes to arcade games Galaxians or Gorf

Gorf

Gorf is an arcade game released in 1981 by Midway Mfg., whose name was advertised as an acronym for "Galactic Orbiting Robot Force". It is a multiple-mission fixed shooter with five distinct modes of play, essentially making it five games in one...

in as much as the player controls a ship (called earth ship) at the bottom of the screen and fires up at rows of ships. Player's can select from four difficulty ratings and the controls are a simple digital joystick to move right or left and a fire button. Individual enemy ships can descend the screen to attack the player's ship. The player has to fight through a number of variations of the enemy.

The four skill levels are:

• Level 1 - Alien fighters attack one at a time
• Level 2 - Alien fighters attack one at a time but combat speed is faster
• Level 3 - Alien fighters attack two at a time
• Level 4 - Alien fighters attack two at a time but combat speed is faster

The game ends once either the player loses five ships or exceeds 9,999 points when a special electronic victory tune was played.