Bringing 3D Acceleration to Tabletop Gaming
Ad Astra Games produces games – science fiction, air combat, and even little RPGs. Many of our games, following from Attack Vector: Tactical through Birds of Prey and Squadron Strike, use 3D movement. Our games have won industry awards and rave reviews from places as diverse as Undefeated and Scientific American. We also produce licensed products, such as Power Projection: Fleets and the upcoming Squadron Strike: Traveller.
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AVID Assistant
The AVID Assistant is a piece of software that handles the AVID for the Ad Astra space combat titles (Squadron Strike and Attack Vector)
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Squadron Strike second edition
Any Ship, Any Universe, Fully 3D
Have you ever wanted to take ships from different universes and see who’d win? If you can imagine it, Squadron Strike lets you build it, then fight it out on the table with your friends. Squadron Strike combines the most detailed ship construction system on the market - it can faithfully reproduce ships from Star Fleet Battles or Babylon 5 Wars - and mates them to a fast-playing tactical engine that includes full 3D maneuver and firing arcs.
If you can't wait to get into the fight, the boxed set comes with the Human Diaspora setting, which also has miniatures available for it. We have more settings in the works.
For typical games of two to four ships per player in 3D, game turns run at 6-15 minutes, depending on the subsystems chosen. In 2D, you can run about three times as many ships in the same period of time, and in 2D, speed of play is comparable to Starmada: Admiralty Edition or Colonial Battlefleet. 3D play is built off of the same set of core mechanics used in Attack Vector: Tactical, with a simultaneous pre-plot/whole turn movement engine, and the fastest damage allocation system on the market, all built off of a rigorously balanced ship design system that takes you from selecting genre assumptions through printing out beautifully formatted Ship System Displays.
- Ideal Scale: Two to six ships per player.
- Recommended Ages: 12+
- Time to Play: 2-3 hours.
- Time to Learn: 1-2 hours.
Attack Vector: Tactical
Space Combat in the Real World
- Origins Award Winner
- Endorsed for scientific accuracy by Scientific American
- The only realistic space combat game playable on a tabletop
Attack Vector: Tactical is the award-winning game of 3D spaceship combat. Command heavily armed and realistically modeled warships hurling kinetic weapons in a bullet-speed ballet of maneuver denial. Feel the crack of of high energy lasers drilling through your armor as you try to get position and timing right for a counter-strike without flying suicidally through a cloud of depleted uranium penetrators.
Best described as a combat flight simulator with spaceships, Attack Vector: Tactical sets the bar for realistic and playable space combat in a boardgame. Each decision you make will have serious consequences down the line, but the award-winning play aids handle all the scary math so you can blow things up.
- Ideal Scale: One to two ships per player.
- Recommended Ages: 14 on up
- Time to Play: 2-3 hours.
- Time to Learn: 2-5 hours.
BIRDS OF PREY
AIR COMBAT IN THE JET AGE
- Origins Award Finalist
- Designed by Dr. Tony Valle, founder of the Airpower Newsletter
- The most realistic non-computerized flight simulator on the market Birds of Prey is the critically acclaimed game of modern jet combat. Clever use of nomograms and laminated play aids give you unprecedented detail and accurate flight dynamics, all from a consistently reasoned out and modeled aerodynamic model. Gone are the days when half the maneuvers had to rely on exceptions to rules you already learned, with special cases for different wing configurations or different altitude levels.
Best described as the most realistic jet combat simulator you can get without a security clearance, Birds of Prey sets the bar for realistic and playable jet combat on the tabletop. Every decision cascades, and it's the only air combat game that can actually show subtle differences between different blocks and nationalities of commonly used aircraft.
- Ideal Scale: One to two planes per player.
- Recommended Ages: 14 on up
- Time to Play: 2-4 hours.
- Time to Learn: 3-8 hours.
Ken Burnside sat down with the Show Me How to Win! YouTube show for a quick demo of Squadron Strike. Check it out!