Wave
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A tower defense game. Enemies stream along a winding road, and your job is to stop them by building towers on the open ground around it. Every kill pays gold to build more towers and upgrade the ones you have, but each wave is tougher than the last and never stops coming. Place wisely, hold the line as long as you can, and chase the highest wave.
Enemies enter at the green square and follow the road to the red square at the other end. Each one that reaches the red end costs you a life; lose all twenty and the game is over.
Tap any empty tile that is not part of the road to build a tower there, as long as you have enough gold. A tower automatically targets and fires at the enemy furthest along the road within its range — you never aim manually. Tap one of your own towers to select it: a ring shows its range, and a bar at the bottom lets you upgrade it for more damage and a little more range, or sell it to recover half of what you spent.
Destroying an enemy pays gold, and the reward grows in later waves, so the more you kill the more you can invest. Between waves there is a short pause to build and upgrade; tap the ▶ button to launch the next wave immediately when you are ready (it stays on the bar even while a tower is selected), or let the timer start it for you. The ⏩ button toggles double speed to move things along.
The waves are endless and every one brings more enemies with far more health than the last, climbing steeply. From wave 3 each wave also mixes in a random share of fast enemies (») with less health and slow, tough enemies (■) with much more; the line at the top of the board shows what the next wave holds, so you can prepare. No defence holds forever — the goal is simply to survive as many waves as you can. Your score is the last wave you reach, plus how much of that final wave you destroyed before the last life went: holding out longer inside the same wave always scores higher.
Build between the lanes. The road snakes back and forth, so the strips of ground between two parallel stretches let one tower cover both stretches at once. The best tiles sit in those strips two or three tiles in from where the road turns, where the range also reaches part of the turn; the tile tucked right into the inside corner of a bend is noticeably worse, and the outer edges of the map are the weakest of all.
Spread out before you stack up. A new tower always costs 55 gold, while each upgrade costs more than the last (40, 70, 100 and so on), so a fresh tower on a good tile usually adds more damage per coin than one more level on a tower you already have. In our test runs, building as many towers as the good tiles allowed and upgrading them evenly lasted about ten waves longer than pouring everything into four towers.
Watch the leak, not just the kills. If even one or two enemies slip through each wave, that trickle will drain your lives long before you notice. The moment something gets past, add damage where the wave broke through rather than expanding elsewhere.
Don't rush the next wave when you are behind. The ▶ button is there to speed up a run that is going well and bank a little extra time, but if your lives are low, use the gap between waves to upgrade first. Selling a poorly placed early tower to fund a better one is often the move that keeps a run alive deep into the high waves.