Get ready to log more life-hours you'll want back on your death bed, as the recently launched The Space Game is ready to steal your time away with space pirate-like mercilessness.

From The Casual Collective, founded on the success of the Flash game Desktop Tower Defense, The Space Game shares much of that game's addictive replayability and time-sucking strategic gameplay. It may be a bit less intuitive at first than DTD, but it looks deep enough to keep me entertained when I should be doing work.

The concept is pretty simple: mine materials while building a proper base defense, minding your energy reserves and upgrading your weapons. Got it? Good. Go play.

The Space Game [The Casual Collective via Kottke]