About the game
Tower Defense is a wave-based strategy game on a single fixed map. A winding road runs from the green arrow on the left edge to the red gate on the right, and every enemy that walks the whole way costs you lives. You never touch the enemies yourself — you spend gold on towers beside the road and let them do the work.
Four towers, four jobs. Arrow towers are the cheap backbone. Frost towers barely scratch anything, but they cut enemy speed almost in half, which quietly gives every other tower far longer to shoot. Cannons splash and are the only sane answer to a swarm burst. Snipers reach across half the board and ignore armour completely, which is exactly what tanks and bosses are built to punish. The map has 44 buildable tiles and you will never afford all of them, so the whole game is the question of what to put where.
How to play
- Tap a tower in the shop row, then tap a highlighted green tile to build it. The shop stays armed, so you can lay a whole line with single taps.
- Tap a tower already on the board to see its range circle and open the upgrade / sell panel.
- The wave button starts the next wave early — every second you skip is turned into bonus gold.
- The 2× button doubles game speed. Use it the moment a wave is clearly under control.
- Keyboard: 1–4 pick a tower, Space starts the wave, F toggles speed, U upgrades, X sells, Esc deselects. Space or Enter restarts after a game over.
Rules
- You start with 200 gold and 20 lives. Every enemy that reaches the exit takes lives — one for a normal enemy, two for a tank, six for a boss.
- Killing an enemy pays a bounty and clearing a wave pays a bonus on top. Selling a tower refunds 70% of everything you put into it.
- Towers upgrade twice. Each level raises damage by 70%, range by 12% and fire rate by 15%.
- Tanks and bosses carry armour, which is subtracted from every single hit. Sniper towers ignore armour entirely.
- Tanks appear from wave 5, swarm bursts from wave 7 and the first boss walks in on wave 10, then every fifth wave after that.
- Your score is the number of waves you cleared. The run ends the instant your lives reach zero.
Strategy & tips
Build where the road doubles back
The road folds over itself four times, and the tiles in the gaps between two horizontal runs are covered twice by the same tower. A single arrow tower there fires at everything on the way out and again on the way back, so it does roughly double the work of the same tower on an outside corner. Fill those middle rows before you spend anything on the edges.
One frost tower is worth three arrows
A frost tower does almost no damage, which makes it look like a waste of 70 gold. What it actually buys is time: enemies caught in it move at little more than half speed, so every arrow, cannon and sniper covering the same stretch of road gets far more shots into the same enemy. Put one at the start of your strongest cluster, not off on its own.
Bank gold before a boss wave
Armour is subtracted from every hit, so a wall of level 1 arrow towers does two damage a shot to a boss and a wave 10 boss simply walks through it. Snipers ignore armour outright and cannons hit hard enough to survive the subtraction. From wave 8 onward, stop buying arrows and save for one of those instead — then start the wave early to turn your waiting time back into gold.
FAQ
Why do my arrow towers barely hurt the boss?
Armour is a flat subtraction from every hit, not a percentage. A level 1 arrow tower does 9 damage, a boss has 7 armour, so each shot lands 2. Snipers ignore armour completely and cannons start high enough that the subtraction still leaves a real hit, which is why bosses are a signal to change what you are building rather than to build more of the same.
Should I build more towers or upgrade the ones I have?
Both work, and the best runs do both. An upgrade is cheaper per point of damage than a new tower and does not need a good tile, so it is the right call once the strong tiles are taken. A wider board covers more of the road, which matters more when enemies are fast and spread out. If a stretch of the road has nothing shooting at it, build; if everything is already covered, upgrade.
Does starting a wave early actually help?
Yes, twice over. You get two gold for every second of build time you skip, and finishing the wave sooner brings the clear bonus forward too. Once your defence comfortably handles a wave, starting early and running at 2× is how the gold curve keeps up with the enemy health curve.
Can enemies destroy my towers?
No. Enemies only ever walk the road toward the exit and never attack anything you build, so a tower is only lost if you sell it. That refund is 70% of everything you put into it, which makes a badly placed early tower an annoyance rather than a disaster.
How is the score calculated?
Your score is simply the number of waves you cleared before your lives ran out, so wave 18 means a score of 17 if the eighteenth wave broke through. Because the map and the wave table are identical for everyone every time, that number is a straight comparison of how well you placed your towers.
