Towers
Towers is a strategy game for 2 players. Build up your towers, push them across the board, and capture castles. The first player to control 4 of the 5 castles wins.
A 7×7 grid. Five special squares called castles sit at the center and four sides of the board (marked in green). Each player starts with 4 towers of height 2, placed near opposite corners. The board below is the real starting position — rotate it with the arrows, or flatten it to 2D.
You win when any of these happen:
• You control 4 of the 5 castles
• You crown 3 castles
• Your opponent has no moves left
A tower is a stack of pieces on a single square. You control a tower if your piece is on top. Towers can be up to 5 pieces tall and may contain a mix of both players’ pieces.
Each castle starts with a neutral base piece. Push your pieces onto a castle to take control of it — whoever has a piece on top owns it. If a castle is filled to height 5 with your piece on top, it becomes crowned (shown with a gold ring).
Pieces are never removed, so the board fills up. Four things decide who wins when it does:
A full tower is safe. Nothing can be built on a height‑5 tower and no push can enter it, so your opponent can never take it — but you can still push it, and with five pieces travelling it is your strongest move.
A push leaves the bottom behind. The pieces that stay on the square you pushed from are the lowest ones. Push a tower you built yourself and the square stays yours; push one you captured and the opponent’s pieces underneath are what remain — you can hand the square back in the same move that wins another. The action bar shows you what a push leaves behind before you commit.
Castles are the last low ground. You cannot build on a castle, so it only grows when pushed onto. As everything else fills to five, castles become the only squares a push can still enter — and the one that tops a castle out at five crowns it for good.
Running out of moves loses. You have no move when every tower you control is full or on a castle and boxed in by towers at least as tall. Capture your opponent’s spare towers, cap the rest, and wall them in. Watch the ⇆ count on the HUD: it is the number of moves each side has left.
Pick one of your towers and choose Build or Push.
Build — Add one of your pieces to the top of a tower you already control. The tower grows by one. Towers can be at most 5 pieces tall. You cannot build directly on a castle square.
Push — Slide a tower (height 2 or taller) in any cardinal direction. As the tower moves, it drops one piece on every square it crosses. It keeps going until it hits a tower that is at least as tall, or the edge of the board. Pushing onto an opponent’s tower puts your pieces on top, capturing it. Use pushes to spread across the board and take over castles.
Select a tower — Click or tap one of your towers. An action bar slides up from the bottom of the screen with the moves you can make. On a computer, hovering an option previews it on the board; on a touch screen, tap once to preview and tap the same button again to confirm. Press Esc, or tap the board away from the bar, to cancel.
Rotate — Use the ← and → arrows beside the compass in the bottom-left corner to turn the board a quarter turn at a time. The board itself does not drag, so a tap always selects.
Zoom — Scroll the mouse wheel, or pinch with two fingers.
3D / 2D — The board is shown in 3D by default. Switch to a flat top-down grid from the menu (⋮) in the bottom-right corner. The boards on this page have their own 3D / 2D button.
Step through a sample game below to see how builds and pushes work. Pushes are animated, so you can watch where each piece ends up.