Astro Wars was a shoot 'em up, 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.

As the display is based on VFD technology, it allows bright, multicoloured in-game elements to be rendered but at the cost of a relatively small screen size.

This electronic table-top game console requires the player to dodge missiles fired by alien ships, destroy the attackers, and launch and recover their space capsule.

The VFD is vulnerable to damage during repair work as the unit features a glass nipple which can easily be fractured causing the loss of the vacuum necessary for the display to operate.

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