TOWER
Strategy · 300 coins to play · free in your browser
Enemies walk a single winding lane from the top of an eight-by-twelve board to your base at the bottom, and your job is to build the line that stops them. You never move anything yourself: you spend ENERGY on towers beside the lane, and then you watch, which makes the real decisions the ones you make in the seconds before a wave arrives. The waves do not run out — clearing the thirtieth is a milestone that pays a bonus and lets you keep going, and the run ends when the lane finally gets through you. The lane is drawn fresh from the day's seed and never branches, so everyone playing the daily is solving the same map in the same order.
Is this your next game?
For planning a defence and adjusting it between waves. ENERGY buys towers inside this run; it is not your account coin balance.
Choose a cabinet in the arcade →How to play
- Pick a tower, then tap or click any cell off the lane to build it. On a keyboard, 1/2/3 pick and the arrow keys plus Enter build.
- GUN hits one target, SLOW drags down everything in range, SPLASH hits a whole cluster — and tapping a tower you built upgrades or sells it.
- Kills and wave clears pay ENERGY, and clearing a wave without losing a life raises the score multiplier.
Mouse and keyboard
- 1, 2 and 3 pick GUN, SLOW and SPLASH — the same order they sit in on the build bar.
- Arrow keys or WASD move a build cursor around the board; Enter or Space builds on it, or opens the panel of a tower already standing there.
- U upgrades the tower under the cursor and X sells it. (Not S — that is already WASD's down.)
Controls on a touchscreen
- Tap or click a tower in the build bar to arm it, then tap any cell off the lane to build there. The bar stays armed, so building five of the same tower is five taps, not ten.
- Tap a tower you already built to open its panel, which offers an upgrade at its current price and a sale at half of everything you have sunk into it.
- Tapping the lane itself, or a cell you cannot currently afford, refuses with a reason rather than doing nothing quietly.
Scoring
- Clearing a wave pays 100 times the wave number, counted up to wave 30 — so wave 30 is worth 3,000 before any multiplier, and every wave after it is worth the same 3,000 rather than more.
- Each kill pays ten times the enemy grade — 10 for the weakest runner, 50 for a boss.
- Clearing wave 30 pays a one-off 5,000 milestone bonus, and killing an enemy early on the lane pays up to 10 extra ENERGY — the further from your base it dies, the more it pays.
- When the run ends you are paid 500 for every life still held and 2 for every unspent point of ENERGY.
Combos and multipliers
The multiplier is the number of waves you have cleared in a row without losing a single life. Three consecutive flawless waves pays 1.5 times, six pays 2, and ten or more pays 2.5 — and one leak resets it to zero the instant the enemy reaches your base, including for the wave it happened in. Late waves are where the multiplier is worth most, which is what makes a life lost on wave 25 expensive in a way one lost on wave 3 is not.
How a run ends
The run ends one way: your third life is gone. There is no finish line to reach — wave 30 pays its bonus and the waves keep coming, harder, until the lane gets through. What a run is worth is therefore how far you pushed it, not whether you beat it.
Worth knowing
- You start with 130 ENERGY — one SPLASH and one GUN exactly, or three GUNs. Kills pay ENERGY equal to the enemy grade and every wave cleared pays 50 more, so the board you finish with is built almost entirely out of what you killed.
- A tower can be upgraded twice, in place. The first upgrade costs 1.5 times its base price and the second 2.25 times, so a maxed GUN is 190 ENERGY all-in against 40 for a fresh one.
- SLOW deals no damage at all — it is an aura, and two of them overlapping do not stack, only the stronger applies. Selling always loses half, so it is a way to fix a mistake rather than a way to make money.
- Enemy health climbs 14% per wave up to wave 30 and then accelerates, compounding a further 10% of the wave-30 figure for every wave past it — which is what eventually ends every run. Speed never changes, and every tenth wave ends with a boss. Grade 4 is the exception worth watching for: it is faster than the tanks and thinner than them, so a line built to out-range slow enemies can still be overrun by quick ones.
Your first run
- Start near a bend where a damage tower can cover several path cells. Check its range against the actual route before buying.
- Place SLOW where damage towers already cover the lane. It deals no damage alone, and overlapping slow auras do not add together.
A mistake to avoid
Selling and rebuilding repeatedly. A sale returns half the investment, so inspect a tower and its upgrade price before deciding to move the defence.
Worked example
Starting ENERGY is 130. A SPLASH costing 90 and a GUN costing 40 spend it exactly; three GUNs cost 120 and leave 10. Neither option is universally best: path coverage determines how long those towers can fire.
Examples describe in-game points or resources. Wallet rewards are calculated separately after submission.
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Entry, rewards and fair play
Sign in to play. A run costs 300 coins. You need the full fee: with a lower balance, the run does not start and no coins are charged. Claim an available daily bonus before trying again. Your score can earn coins back and is validated by the server before ranking. How the economy and verification work →
TOWER is in the daily rotation: 3 of the 16 games in the rotation pool carry a ranked board and a share of the community prize pool each day, drawn from the calendar date. This pool includes legacy BlockDrop and differs from the public catalog. On its day this cabinet wears a gold star.
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