Kingsroad

About this game

Kingsroad is a tower defence game about a road you cannot change. The cart track from the gate to your keep is drawn before you place a single tower, it snakes back on itself four or five times, and it is the only way in. You build on a fixed handful of dashed pads beside it, twelve waves of rebels march down it, and at the end you have either held it or you have not. There is no endless mode and no high score to grind — there is a siege, and a win screen. Because the road never changes, the game can promise something a maze-building defence cannot: the map you are looking at has already been beaten. Every road is generated and then played to completion by a reference build before it is handed to you, all twelve waves, twenty villagers still alive at the end. That reference build spends only gold that kill bounties actually pay, on the pads your map actually has, and it never builds a Barracks or picks up a single gold crate — so both of those systems are proved to be upside rather than necessities, and a leak is a build you got wrong instead of a map you were never given the money for. What you do with the road is the game. Because it folds back on itself, the cells caught between two runs cover the march twice, and finding those is the first thing that separates a good build from a busy one. Four towers refuse to be a general answer: Archers are cheap sustained damage that flat armour reduces to a scratch, the Ballista sends one heavy bolt down a lane through four marchers at once and wants a straight built for it, the Bombard lobs a shell at where they will be and is worth most where the road doubles back, and the Barracks puts two men-at-arms in the road who simply stop the column dead until they fall. Marchers cannot overtake each other, so a blocked road becomes the dense red queue the whole genre is built on. Between waves you spend, upgrade and decide whether to send the next wave early for a gold bonus; during a wave, crates of gold drop across the field and vanish after a few seconds, so your hand is never idle and your economy can outrun the one the proof assumed. Play with a mouse, a finger or the keyboard.

Controls

Tap or click a dashed pad to open the build cards, then tap the tower you want.

Keyboard

• [ and ] step through the build pads, 1-4 build on the selected one.
• U upgrades the selected tower, X sells it, Esc closes the cards.
• Space cycles 1x/2x/3x speed, N sends the next wave early, G grabs the oldest gold crate.

Touch

• Tap a gold crate on the field to collect it before it expires.
• Tap a built tower to upgrade or sell it from the same bottom sheet.

How to play

Twelve waves of rebels march the road from the gate to your keep, and you have to stop all twelve.

• Build on the dashed pads beside the road. You cannot move the road and you cannot build on it.
• Every leaked marcher costs villagers — a brute costs three, the warlord costs six. Reach the end of wave 12 with at least one villager and you win.
• Gold comes from kills. Crates that drop during a wave are a bonus you have to tap before they expire.

What each tower is for

• Archer is cheap sustained damage, but flat armour cuts every arrow down to almost nothing.
• Ballista pierces four marchers in a line, so it wants a long straight stretch pointed at it.
• Bombard lobs a shell at where they will be, and is worth most where the road folds back on itself.
• Barracks puts two men-at-arms in the road who stop the column outright until they are cut down.

Between waves

• Send a wave early with the button, or the N key, for two gold per second of build phase you skip.
• Selling refunds 70% during a build phase and 50% once a wave is running.

Read the full Kingsroad rules and strategy →