Six gates on the rim. One crystal in the middle. Something worse coming through every minute - and now some of it flies. Six elements on one brutal wheel, 180 towers to climb, fusions that weld two elements into a single turret and ascensions that stack on a third. Two arenas to hold - one already built, one you build yourself. One tab. No install. Straight in.
Hex maze · 6 gateswave incoming
The arena is a hexagon: six gates on the rim, six walls of hedge between them and the crystal, gaps punched through every one. Every gate feeds eight completely different ways in, and a wave spreads itself across all of them instead of politely queuing down one lane. That's 48 routes running at you. There is no choke point to camp. There is the ring you covered, and the one you didn't.
Reaching the middle isn't even the end of it. Anything that touches the crystal grabs a life and sprints back out with it. Chase it down before it reaches the rim and you get the life back. Let it go and it's gone for good.
And the maze keeps opening up. Every five waves, fresh doors crack open in the hedges, routes get shorter, and the corner you fortified stops being the only way through. Nothing you built is wasted - it just stops being enough.
Every wave has an element. Fire this time. Poison next. Arcane on the one you were saving gold for. Your towers are permanent, the wave never is - and the moment that clicks, you stop guessing and start building.
Six elements, and every one beats the next two. Hit an element you beat and the damage doubles. Hit one that beats you and it lands for less than half - and the deeper the run goes, the harsher the wheel gets: past wave 36, off-element damage withers to almost nothing. Same tower, same monster, wildly different wave.
One button on the join screen, and it changes everything about how you play. Same 180 towers, same monsters, same elemental wheel - completely different question to answer.
The maze is already there and it's out to get you. Six hedge walls, doors punched through them, and every plot is a spot beside a road somebody else drew. Your job is reading it: find the plots that cover three corridors at once before the wave does.
No hedges. No corridors. Nothing. Bare ground from the rim to the crystal, and your towers are the walls. Every turret you drop bends the path, so a good build turns a 20-second sprint into a two-minute death march. One rule: you can never seal it. Leave a way through, or the game won't let you build.
Open Field is the builder's mode. On the ring board you play the maze you were given. Here you draw it - switchbacks, dead ends, a long ugly spiral that walks the whole wave past every tower you own, twice. Get it right and the same gold buys you four times the shooting.
This isn't "same tower, bigger number". Every element fields four shapes of violence - a splasher, a multishot, a sniper and a short-range bruiser - and every rung is a new model on the board: new silhouette, new weapon, new light show, so you can read your own defence at a glance. Four lines are open from the first second. The rest are earned mid-run by actually playing an element: go wide in it to open new lines, go deep to open higher tiers.
And the top of every line ascends: tiers five and six weld a second, then a third element into the same turret - a tower that fights on the best of its matchups and closes its line's blind spot. Ascension is priced in alloy and runecore, the two materials no mine ever spits out.
Thorns that grow into a cannon and clear an entire junction in one shot.
Tier 6 · Emberwood Colossus
One colossal hit at a time. This is what you point at a boss.
Tier 6 · Pyre Bore
Smashes and slows in the same swing. Nothing gets past it in a hurry.
Tier 6 · Emberroot Maw
Deep slows over a wide blast. The best crowd control in the game.
Tier 6 · Stormcloak Maw
Four targets at once, all chilled, none of them getting far.
Tier 6 · Squallspray Crown
Outranges everything else you own, and still hits like a truck.
Tier 6 · Zephyr Spire
Splits lightning across four lanes once it's fully grown.
Tier 6 · Monsoon Gyre
Five shots a second. Small waves just evaporate in front of it.
Tier 6 · Stormtide Arc
Fast, wide, and brutal to anything that shows up in a clump.
Tier 6 · Tempest Tide
The widest blast radius in the game. Standing together is a death sentence.
Tier 6 · Caldera Gyre
Costs next to nothing, never stops burning, holds a corner on its own.
Tier 6 · Cinderstone Briar
Throws fire at four separate targets without missing a beat.
Tier 6 · Earthburst Fan
Bursting fungal pods that rot everything standing in the cloud.
Tier 6 · Runeblight Bloom
One fang, one target, one enormous dose. Bosses hate this line.
Tier 6 · Runevenom Lance
A pit of decay that grinds the pack down as it squeezes past.
Tier 6 · Runerot Maw
Carved stones that detonate in rings of raw mana.
Tier 6 · Stormrune Pyre
Splits one beam across four targets and never stops refracting.
Tier 6 · Stormprism Crown
A ward that charges for an age, then deletes something important.
Tier 6 · Stormward Lance
Go wide or go tall. The plots that cover four routes at once run out long before your gold does. Four cheap towers, or one tier-6 monster on ground you already hold? You'll make that call twenty times a run, and it's the whole difference between a defence and a junkyard.
Mine the rare stuff and you can weld two elements into a single tower - and a fused tower always fights on its better half. It is the only thing you can build that the next wave's element can never punish. Six pairings, two lines each, and the two sisters are never shaped the same: one splashes, one snipes. Push a fusion to its final rung and it ascends too, folding a third element in. Expensive, slow to reach, worth every minute of mining.
Magma pours a huge, slow blast over a whole junction. Scoria snipes single targets from the other side of the board.
Steam scalds a crowd and chills it in the same breath. Scald is a jet that simply never lets up.
Ashfall rains on four targets at a time. Pyroclast is rapid splash for anything that dares to clump.
Mire drops a wide, sticky bog that halves the pack's pace. Moraine hits long and cold.
Grit is a long-range hammer. Dune throws blinding, slowing splash straight across the lane.
Squall chills four lanes at once. Aurora is fast, wide, and disgustingly pretty about it.
Kills pay gold. Everything else you mine - eight materials, each with its own camp on the rim and its own little crew hauling loads back and forth while you fight - and the two that matter most you don't mine at all: alloy and runecore are forged, in factories that eat your stockpiles on a batch clock. Skip the economy and you hit a wall at exactly the moment the waves stop being polite.
Lumber camps and quarries go up early and pay for the board-wide powers you'll lean on all run long.
Delves and fonts are the only door to a two-element tower. No pile of gold will ever buy one.
The deep pair. Amber seeps and glass kilns feed a fusion line's top rungs - and the smeltery that comes after.
The scarcest stuff on the map. Spore rings and star craters buy the late research: Elemental Attunement, Awakened Base, Heartwood Rebirth.
Forged, never mined: factories smelt stone, amber and obsidian into alloy, press wood, glowcap and starmetal into runecore - the only coin tiers five and six accept.
A starter camp, then an upgrade that sends out more workers, carrying more, faster - and four factory chains on top.
A factory doesn't mine - it drains the camps around it. Site it well and it never idles; site it badly and your ascension budget starves.
Every camp stays locked until the rung below it has paid for itself. You climb this ladder, you never skip it.
Bases and rock get stripped bare and grow back slowly - or you spend gold and call the entire map back at once.
Thirteen buttons across the bottom of the screen. None of them are handed to you. Each has to be researched first, and each asks for something specific: build a camp, bank some stone, kill 500 things, push a tower deep. Pay it once and the button is yours for the rest of the run - expensive, on a long cooldown, for the exact moments that decide it.
The next wave's roster shows up before a single monster spawns. Read it right and you build the answer with time to spare. Read it wrong and you spend the next ninety seconds watching your lives walk out of the arena. And they don't all walk anymore: some fly straight over your maze, some jump your walls, and not every tower can answer either.
Spore Ticks and Gale Sprites barely hit at all. They just show up in their hundreds, from every gate at once. Bring splash damage or bring more lives.
Spore Tick · Green Whelp · Wisp Swarm · Gale Sprite
Coral Brutes and Stone Golems soak everything and shrug off chip damage. You need something that hits once, and hits properly.
Coral Brute · Stone Golem · Abyss Hulk · Treant
Slag Mortars and Shard Lancers shoot back, wrecking your towers and camps on the way past. Your buildings patch themselves up between waves - if they survive to see one.
Slag Mortar · Flint Slinger · Shard Lancer · Brine Spitter
Storm Kites and Prism Drakes take the straight line over every wall you own. Ground-slam towers can't touch them - you need guns that look up.
Storm Kite · Cinder Moth · Brine Gull · Prism Drake
Fen Leapers and Blink Stalkers walk your maze - until they vault a wall and skip half of it. Their hops are budgeted, but a slow sniper never lands one.
Fen Leaper · Boulder Leaper · Tide Skipper · Blink Stalker
Cinder Drake. Plague Ogre. Oblivion Herald. Rime Leviathan. Twelve of them, two per element - enormous, escorted, and never the same one twice in a row.
Cinder Drake · Plague Ogre · Oblivion Herald · Rime Leviathan
BuildBuildBuildBuildBuildBreatheBrace
Nearly double the wave before it. You either got ready during the lull or you didn't.
Big body, heavy escort, cloud of small stuff. Splash alone won't cut it. Neither will single-target.
One enormous thing, walking slowly, bringing friends. Use everything you own.
Anything that grabs a life is sprinting for the exit. Kill it on the way out and the life comes straight back to you. That chase is half the fight - and it's why a tower aimed at the rim is never a wasted tower.
Any mode, either board, three difficulties. You decide all three before the first wave.
You, the circle and the wave counter. Every call is yours, and so is every mistake.
One board, one pool of lives, everyone building at once. Somebody still has to volunteer to do the mining.
Up to four players, one board each, the same waves hitting all of you. Last one standing wins.
In versus, your kills don't die - they relocate. Every monster you put down gets back up on your rivals' boards, and any life it steals over there lands on your lifebar. Defending well is attacking: hold your own circle and you're feeding everybody else into the grinder while you do it.
NormalHardNightmare
Sign in and your runs get ranked by the wave you reached, per mode. Or play as a guest and get exactly the same game, minus the bragging rights.
Straight out of a real run. No mockups, no touch-ups, no fake explosions.
Yes, all of it. Nothing to install, nothing to buy, no ads in the arena. Play as a guest right now; signing in only puts your runs on the leaderboard.
No. Open the page and you're in, usually inside ten seconds. It runs on desktop and on a decent phone or tablet.
Ring Maze is the built one: a hexagon of hedge walls with doorways that widen every five waves, and you build in the plots beside the corridors. Open Field is bare ground - your towers are the walls, so the route is whatever you leave open. Same towers, same monsters, totally different puzzle. You pick one on the join screen.
180, across 36 upgrade lines - twenty-four single-element lines that go six tiers deep, plus twelve fusion lines that mix two elements. The top tiers of every line ascend, welding a second and even a third element into one turret.
Fire, air, earth, poison, water and arcane, on one wheel where every element beats the next two. Strong hits land for double damage, weak ones for less than half - and the deeper the run goes, the harsher the wheel gets.
Some try. Flyers soar straight over your walls, jumpers hop them a limited number of times, and raiders shoot back at your towers and camps. Not every tower can hit every body - big slow slammers can't reach flyers, slow snipers can't track jumpers - so a real defense mixes roles.
Up to four of you. Co-op puts everyone on one board sharing one pool of lives. Versus gives each player their own board and the same waves - everything you kill gets sent onto theirs, and three sabotage abilities exist only in that mode.
It doesn't, until you do. Waves scale forever and there is no final boss. Your score is the wave you reached when the last life walked out the gate.
Four lines are open from the first second. The rest get earned during the run by playing their element - going wide opens new lines, going deep opens higher tiers. Abilities are researched with what you mine and forge.
Yes, and the interface rebuilds itself for it: the build menu becomes a bottom sheet you thumb through, and tapping a tower opens a ring of actions right around it instead of a side panel. Same game, same board, nothing cut.
HexelTD