🏹 Tower Merge Defense 🏰

🎯 Goal

Monsters march along the road. Don't let them reach the exit — you have 20 HP. You start each run with 100 coins and 4 turret pads.

🖥️ One screen, inside the canvas

The whole run interface is drawn inside the park canvas and fills your window: the coin purse (top-left), HP and the wave number in the top bar, the Start Wave, speed, auto-start, sound, pause and help buttons there too, and the turret shop, the merge bench and the discard tray along the bottom. Only the menu screens (this help, the pause menu, the run summary, the lobby and the co-op panel) are page overlays.

🏗️ Buying pads

A run starts with 4 pads on random spots of the park. Every other marked spot is a locked pad position (dashed circle + its class hint) — the park is your build space, not a fixed board.

• Press 🏗️ Buy pad in the bottom strip — the price rises with every pad you buy.
• The park highlights every free position: click one to put the pad down.
• Esc or a right-click cancels — the pad stays bought and you can place it later.
• Every 10th wave (10, 20, 30) hands out a free pad as part of the milestone.

🛒 Buying turrets → the merge bench

Clicking a shop button pays for the turret and drops it on the merge bench below the park — never straight onto a pad. The bench holds 8 turrets; if it is full the purchase is refused (and you are not charged).

• Warrior (125) — short range (105), loves corners
• Archer (75) — longest range (210), open spots
• Mage (180) — strongest, loves enemy bottlenecks

These are the very turrets you see on the park, drawn by the same code (one gold star per level) — in the shop, on the bench and on the road.

🗺️ Parks

Pick a park in the lobby before a run — N, W or 4. Each one has its own road, its own candidate pad positions (each with a class hint) and its own scenery; waves, rewards and rules are identical everywhere.

👹 The Horde

Four families arrive in order of nastiness: Skeletons (waves 1-6), Zombies (7), Goblins (15) and Ogres (19). Each family also comes in classes: fast (lean, quick), armored (plated, tough), elite (glowing, hits hard) and boss (crowned, huge).

Every 10th wave is a milestone, and the two kinds alternate — the wave chip in the top bar names it:

• ⚔️ ELITE waves (10, 30, 50, 70 …) — a hard pack of a family's elites, all of them tougher than usual. No crown, but a real spike.
• 👑 BOSS waves (20, 40, 60 …) — a crowned, enormous monster with a big HP bar. Wave 20 is a three-phase fight.

⚒️ The merge bench

The bench is where turrets wait and get built up before they defend anything:

1. Buy → the turret lands in the first free bench cell.
2. Merge → drag a bench turret onto another of the same class + level.
3. Deploy → drag a bench turret onto an empty pad; the cell frees up.
4. Return → drag a pad turret back onto a free bench cell to re-merge later.

Replace-or-merge: drop a turret onto an occupied seat and the two swap places — unless they are the same class and the same level, in which case they merge instead. That works every way round: bench↔pad, pad↔pad and bench↔bench. A pad turret that lands on your bench becomes yours, and a swap on the map never changes who owns what. While you drag, the target under the pointer is labelled MERGE, SWAP, MOVE — or MAX / LOCKED when the drop would be refused (a max-level pair, a pad position nobody has opened).

✨ Merging

Drag one turret onto another of the same class and level:

• Lv1 + Lv1 → Lv2
• Lv2 + Lv2 → Lv3 …
• … up to Lv6 (max)

Merging raises damage only and resets ultimate charge. Two Lv1s cover more ground; one Lv4 hits much harder — your call!

⚡ Ultimates

Every turret charges a bar above its head by attacking:

• Warrior — War Cry: slows nearby monsters 30% for 4s
• Archer — Arrow Rain: AOE damage around its target
• Mage — Tornado: heavy damage over 5s

🗑️ The discard tray

The bottom-right of the canvas holds a discard tray. Drag a turret from a pad or from the bench onto it and it is thrown away, refunding half of what it cost — while you hover, the tray shows the exact amount you get back:

• Lv1 Archer 75 → +37, Warrior 125 → +62, Mage 180 → +90
• Lv3 Archer → +150 (4 purchases worth ÷ 2)

Dropping a turret anywhere else behaves exactly as always (merge / move / deploy) — nothing is sold by accident, and dragging nothing onto the tray never charges or destroys anything. Esc or a right-click cancels a drag or a pad placement.

🎁 Rewards

Only every 10th wave (10, 20, 30, 40 …) pays out: bonus coins, a free pad (waves 10/20/30) plus free random turrets — and the deeper you are, the more turrets you get and the higher their level (Lv1 at wave 10 up to Lv5 at wave 90+). Filled every pad? The missing turret is paid out in coins instead.

💎 Lobby

Every wave you clear earns gems. Spend them in the lobby on permanent upgrades.

👥 Co-op

Use Play with Friend to defend the park together — up to 3 players (one host + two friends). Every player has their own coin purse and their own 8-cell merge bench, but the park is shared: the pads and every turret deployed on them.
So you plant a Mage on the map and your friend can take it onto their own bench, merge it there and deploy it again — anything on the map belongs to the whole team. Buying a turret or a pad is charged to your own purse, and a turret you deployed is yours to throw away (a friend has to take it onto their bench first).
More friends mean a bigger horde: from wave to wave the monsters get more HP and arrive in bigger groups (see CONFIG.COOP), so a team is never simply easier. The host's run simulates the battle for everyone (and the host picks the park); pad purchases, merges, swaps and deploys are validated by the host, and so is the rhythm of the run — the speed mode and the auto-start countdown belong to the host, so one player can never speed up or slow down the team's waves. Joining is one link each way: the host sends the invite link, the friend opens it and sends the reply link back — the panel walks you through it and shows a 5-character session ID to compare. The host repeats that for the second friend, and neither invite disturbs the connection that is already up.

🎮 Controls

• Space starts the next wave (the keyboard twin of the Start Wave button)
• ⏱ Auto-start starts every wave by itself after a short countdown, which the Start Wave button shows — it is paused while the run is paused, while a menu is open and while you are placing a pad
• speed cycles 1× → 2× → 4× → 1× (and 🔊 sound cycles 100% → 50% → muted → 100%; sound is synthesised, there are no audio files)
• Drag turrets between the bench and the pads to move, merge, swap and deploy
• Drag a turret onto the 🗑️ discard tray to throw it away
• 🖱️ The pointer tells you what will happen: an arrow over empty park, a hand over every in-canvas control, a crosshair while you place a pad, a grab on a turret you can drag and a clenched one while you carry it — plus the MERGE, SWAP and refused marks over a drop target. In co-op your own colour is on the pointer and on your purse chip. Pick the look of all of it under 🖱️ Cursor style in the lobby (Glove, Scope and Star, or the plain system cursors) — it is a local preference and it is saved.
• Right-click / Esc cancels a drag or a pad placement, pause anytime (P)