How to build a maze in tower defense

Real boards from Maze Tower Wars. Every path length on this page is counted with the game’s own rules.

In most tower defense games the road is drawn for you, and your job is to line it with towers. In a maze tower defense game the field is open. Troops walk the shortest route from the entrance to the exit, and your towers are the walls. Building that route (players of the old Warcraft III tower defense maps called it mazing) is half the game: a troop that walks twice as far takes twice the fire from the same towers.

The rules of the board

Every board in Maze Tower Wars is 7 tiles wide and 22 long. Troops enter at IN at the top and leave at OUT at the bottom.
They always take the shortest open route, moving up, down, left and right. They never cut diagonally.
You can’t close the route. The game won’t place a tower that leaves no way through, so the goal is to bend the path, not block it.
On an empty board the walk is 21 tiles. Path length is the number to watch: the practice range counts it live, and the tower report after each match shows it for every maze.

Lining the road doesn’t lengthen it

An empty board: the path runs straight from IN to OUT, 21 tiles — **Empty board**0 towers · path 21

Eight towers in two rows either side of the straight path, which is still 21 tiles — **Lining the road**8 towers · path 21

The habit from fixed-path games is to put towers on both sides of the road. On an open board the troops simply walk straight between them: eight towers, and the path is still 21 tiles. Those towers will still shoot, but they get no extra time to do it. Every tile you add to the path gives every tower on the board more shots.

The diagonal wall

Because troops can’t cut corners, two towers that touch only at a corner already block like a wall. A diagonal line of towers is a solid wall, and it spreads down the board while it does it, so it can steer troops toward an edge from one row and catch them on the next.

Eight towers in two short diagonals, one by IN and one by OUT, forcing a 33-tile path that crosses the board twice — **Best 8-tower opener**8 towers · path 33

You start a match with 100 gold, enough for eight Brawlers at 12 gold each. We had a computer try thousands of eight-tower layouts on the real board, and the best one it found is the two diagonals above: one at the entrance pushes the troops to the far edge, one at the exit makes them walk all the way back across. That’s a 33-tile walk, about 57% longer than the empty board, and every tower is pulling its weight. Take any one away and the path drops by 2 to 6 tiles.

More towers, smarter walls

A 20-tower maze: troops are pushed to the left edge, then wind through a pocket of towers near the exit, 51 tiles — **Best 20-tower maze**20 towers · path 51

A full serpentine: nine walls of six towers with alternating gaps, a 75-tile path — **Full serpentine**54 towers · path 75

The obvious big maze is the serpentine: wall after wall across the board, gaps on alternating sides. It works, with 75 tiles of path, but it takes 54 towers and each one adds just one tile. The best 20-tower layout the search found adds one and a half tiles per tower, the same rate as the opener. Wherever you can, end a wall on a diagonal and let the troops double back past towers they have already walked by. Gold you don’t spend on walls goes into upgrades.

Put the damage where the path doubles back

Length is half the job. A tower standing between two stretches of path shoots troops on both, so the corners and pockets in the diagrams are where your best towers belong. A Brawler is the cheapest wall at 12 gold. A Cannon costs 70 and takes two tiles, so don’t build walls out of Cannons: put them where their splash covers the most path. When you upgrade, one tap upgrades every tower of a type, so a maze built from a few kinds of tower is cheap to grow.

What a maze can’t stop

Flyers fly straight down the middle and ignore your maze. Keep a few towers that hit air (Archers, Teslas or Mages) near the centre column.
Runners move nearly twice as fast as a Grunt. They punish short mazes, which makes them the best reason to keep lengthening yours.
Stealth troops walk the maze, but only towers that can detect them can shoot. Teslas always can; Archers and Mages need the Detection upgrade.
Armored troops shrug off arrows and fists, and a leak costs two lives. A long maze buys time for Mages and Cannons to work on them.

The field guide has the full list of towers, troops and counters.

Practise your maze

The practice range in Maze Tower Wars gives you unlimited gold, any troop at any tier and up to four times speed, with the path length counted as you build. Save up to three layouts there, then bring one into a real match as a blueprint: its towers show as faint ghosts on your board during the prep round.

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