Games like Marvel Snap, if you want the three minutes to be real-time

What the two have in common

Snap players usually name the same reasons for staying. Decks are small enough to understand at a glance. A game fits into a spare moment. And you are never waiting on an opponent, because both players act at once.

Skyfire is built on those same three ideas:

• A small deck. Seven cards, each one a deliberate choice. You see most of your deck every match.
• A short match. Three minutes of regulation, with sudden-death overtime only if the score is level.
• No waiting. Both commanders play at the same time, continuously.

The change: simultaneous turns become no turns

In Snap you both choose, then both reveal, six times. The skill is prediction: what will they play, and where?

In Skyfire the cards are ships, and once launched they fly, fight and die on the board in front of you. You respond to what you see rather than what you guess. The skill moves from bluffing to timing and placement: launching a defender so it meets an attack at the right spot, or holding energy for the two seconds it takes your opponent to overcommit.

Where the variety comes from

Snap keeps games fresh with its locations: the board itself changes every match. Skyfire's board never changes. Its variety comes from the races. Your opponent's race tells you, before a single card is played, what kind of match this will be.

Against the Empire of the Birds you hold something back for the ships you cannot see yet. Against the Crystals you think twice about pushing through a lane that might be webbed. Against the Horwasp you watch your own homeworld, because their pods can land anywhere. Reading that and adjusting a deck you already know is the Skyfire version of playing the locations.

Collecting without a wall

Snap hands out cards along a collection track. Skyfire has a few moving parts, and none of them is a paywall:

• Every win pays a chest; every loss still pays some megacredits.
• Chests hold blueprints. Enough blueprints of a ship, plus megacredits, fit it with the next tech level, up to ten.
• New hulls drop from chests as you rank up with a race.
• New races are unlocked with tokens earned at rank milestones.

Chests are never sold. What the store does sell is listed here.

Things a Snap player might miss

• The snap. There is no doubling the stakes and no retreating to cut a loss. What a ranked battle is worth depends on the gap between your rank and your opponent's: beating a higher-ranked commander pays more.
• Playing one-handed while distracted. Skyfire is real-time. For three minutes it wants your attention.
• The characters. The stars here are ships: the Missouri, the Dark Wing, the Gorbie. If you know VGA Planets you already know them.

Things you gain

• Watching your deck work. The fleet you built is on the board, in 3D, doing the thing you built it to do.
• 2v2. Invite a friend and fight another pair, each with your own deck.
• A browser version that shares your account with the mobile apps.