So here is the concept: Two players face off attempting to destroy each others' planets. They have a set number of ships and limited fuel to accomplish their task. A player wins when they have destroyed a certain point value in planets or have destroyed their opponent's mothership, known as their Galaxy. If both players run out of fuel, the player with the most points wins.
There a 9 different ships and each player receives various amounts of each one. Each ship has a cool space name like "Nova", "Quasar", or "Planemo". You never get more ships but you may be able to get small amounts of additional fuel. To deploy a ship it will cost between 1 and 4 Fuel Consumption Units (or FCU) Each player will have between 10-15 planets, depending on game length.
There are two phases during the game; the Deployment Phase and the Combat Phase.
Deployment Phase:
Each player takes alternating turns deploying ships, face down, on a planet they wish to attack or defend. A player may place 1 or all of their ships on a single planet during a turn. Then their opponent will do the same. This will repeat until both players have deployed 5 times each. On a turn a player may never deploy ships to more than one planet though they may deploy ships to the same planet on subsequent turns.
Example!
Bob deploys two ships face down on Steve's Planet Rosaba. Steve wishes to defend it, so on his turn he places 4 ships face down on Rosaba. Bob is determined to annihilate this planet so on his next turn he places 3 more ships down on the same planet. Steve, ever so confident, decides Rosaba's forces can hold their own and chooses to place 3 ships down on Bob's Planet Nor. This goes on until both have made 5 deployments.
Keep in mind neither team knows what the other has placed down.
Combat Phase:
I tried to make this as simple as possible. Its a mix between Axis & Allies and Heroscape. Each ship will bring into the fight a certain number of attack and defense dice, some significantly more than others. Both players reveal their cards and determine how many attack and defense dice they will need. Then then place all their forces on the "Battle board" face down in a random order, each on their own side.
The attack dice are rolled first. It will probably be best to roll separately, but not necessarily needed. Attack dice hit on a 3 or less when rolling a d6. For each die that scores a hit place a damage token on an opponent's face down ship. After all tokens have been placed, next roll defense dice. These dice hit on a 2 or less. For every defense die that hits remove one token from one of your ships.
Then everyone flips over the ships and those with a token are destroyed. I wanted to get a feel for the chaos of a space battle with the loses being random, so I am hoping this does that simply.
A player may retreat at any time or continue on with the fight. If the attacker wins the battle they may attempt to destroy the planet with their ships. I'm still working on that last part.
Either way I got the cards ready and I'm testing it tonight!
So I made the cards myself by using two sheets of gloss cardstock and some spray adhesive. I then needed an exacto knife to cut them out. They look cool but the process took too long so we didnt play test this weekend :/
To your question about hitpoints: Yes, to a degree. Big ships bring in a stat called Armor. If a ship has 2 Armor it means that for the battle you gain 2 Armor tokens. These can be used in two ways. You can either use a Armor token to remove a Damage token from a ship (like a Defense roll that automatically 'hit') or you can use a Armor token to "save" a ship that has an Armor stat. So if your powerful ship did take a hit you just use the Armor token and its still alive.
I'm hoping this brings in some strategy because the more ships you save "at random" means more firepower during the next round of combat but also puts the bigger ships at risk later in the fight.