Hold the road against the Persian host

In the fifth century BC a handful of Greek city-states stood against the largest empire the world had seen. This is a tower defence about those stands: choose your ground, place your defenders, and do not let the line break.

The campaign

Twelve battles in historical order, from Marathon in 490 BC to Salamis in Cyprus in 450, in four acts. Each is fought on a hex battlefield with real terrain, and the enemy finds its own way across it, so what you build changes where they march. Besides hoplites, archers, oracles and catapults you can lay field works: palisades, caltrops, fire pits and ditches, which scouts path around and cavalry will not cross. Later battlefields are bigger, and some change mid-battle: a path opens, a fleet lands, a canal is drained. Win the last one and there is a short film to see you out.

Skirmish

Four modes at whichever difficulty you set:

• Classic – six square maps with a fixed road, fifteen waves.
• Battlefields – any campaign battle on its own, open from the start.
• Harvest (experimental) – battlefields with farms, presses and mines to raise on marked sites and guard from pillage.
• Last Stand – any map, with waves that never end. The record is how many you held.

How it plays

Pick a defender, tap a tile. Upgrade twice, or sell for 60% back. Four difficulty tiers, Recruit to Immortal, apply to campaign and skirmish alike. Mouse, touch and keyboard are equal: everything works with arrows, Enter and Esc, and the number keys pick defenders.

Alpha

This is the first public build. Every battle has been won by the game’s own test bot at every tier, but the later campaign battles have had far less human play than the early ones, so expect the balance to move. If something is too hard, too easy, or simply wrong, say so in the comments: which battle, which difficulty, and what happened.

Progress is saved on your machine. In the browser version it lives in the browser’s storage, so clearing site data clears your campaign.

Builds

Windows, Linux and macOS downloads, or play in the browser. The macOS build is signed and notarised. The browser build is about 75 MB and takes a moment to load the first time.

Credits

Made with Godot Engine 4. Splash, shields, terrain and unit stills made with Midjourney; unit sprite sheets made with ChatGPT; music generated with Suno; the ending film generated with Gemini; sound effects synthesised in code. Fonts: Cinzel and EB Garamond (SIL Open Font License). Hold is © 2026 Kintarla Pty Ltd, trading as Reefwing Software.