What is a tower wars game?

The player-versus-player side of tower defense, and how Maze Tower Wars plays it.

A tower wars game is tower defense where the other side is played by people. Each player defends their own board, and the troops attacking you are sent by your opponents. Sending is more than an attack: every troop you send raises your income, so the whole match is a running trade between defense you need now and the economy that pays for later.

Where it comes from

Tower defense took off as custom maps, first for StarCraft and then in a big way for Warcraft III, whose map editor let anyone build one. The tower wars maps turned it into a contest between players. Line Tower Wars is the one most people remember: every player held a lane, mazed it with towers, and bought units to send down the other lanes, and every unit sent raised the sender’s income. Wintermaul Wars and others played with the same idea.

Maze Tower Wars keeps that loop and builds the rest new, for phones and short sessions.

How Maze Tower Wars plays it

• Your board is your maze. It’s 7 tiles wide and 22 long, and troops walk the shortest open route from IN to OUT. You can’t block it, so you bend it. How to build a maze
• Every send is an investment. A troop costs gold now and raises your income for the rest of the match. A 10-gold Grunt adds 0.6 gold every 5 seconds, so it pays for itself in about 80 seconds and keeps paying.
• Six troops, six tiers. Grunts, Runners, Swarms, Armored, Flyers and Stealth. Upgrading your Camp moves everything you send up a tier.
• Five towers, two paths each. Archer, Brawler, Tesla, Mage and Cannon. Every path ends in a capstone, and every capstone can be mastered into a Champion.
• Leaks carry on. In three- and five-player matches, troops that get through one maze march on into the next.
• The Onslaught ends it. Everyone starts with 40 lives. At 7:00 every troop sent from then on has 50% more health, and the match runs until one player is left.

Made for phones and short sessions

Tower wars used to mean a PC, a lobby and a long evening. Maze Tower Wars runs in a phone browser with nothing to install, and a match usually takes 8 to 12 minutes.

• Quick match is a rated five-player free-for-all, with bots filling empty seats and a weekly and all-time leaderboard.
• Private rooms open with a link or a code, and friends can join as guests.
• If your signal drops, you have a minute to rejoin right where you were.
• Bots on Easy, Normal and Hard for 1 vs 1, three-player and five-player games. Hard reads your maze and sends what it’s missing.
• A practice range with unlimited gold, any troop at any tier, and saved layouts you can bring into a match.

Where to start

Read the field guide for every tower, troop and counter, and the mazing page for your first layout. Then play a bot on Normal before you try quick match.

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