Wall Archer
No relief is coming. You are the last archer on the wall, the town lit behind you.
Twenty hours, first light to deep night. Keep them out.
Hold anywhere on the screen and drag toward your target, then release. The further you drag the more power, and a full draw lights up a ring. Nocking takes time; while it is on cooldown the whole aiming line dims.
You shoot from up on the wall, well above the ground, so a full-power flat shot is your longest range. An arc is not for reaching further. It is for making the arrow fall from above.
The steeper it falls, the more energy the arrow carries and the harder it hits; and an arrow falling steeply punches through a shield. The same angle is a shield break against a shieldbearer and a heavy hit against everyone else.
Damage to the wall carries into the next hour and never grows back on its own. The cracks, the fallen battlements, the town windows going dark one by one are all the same number wearing different faces. When the wall goes, the night is over.
You cannot hold twenty hours alone. Muster resets every hour; what you do not spend does not carry over and cannot be turned into gold, so there is no reason to save it.
But you start with only 2 points, which is one archer or two footmen. Building an actual line means buying the Levy up level by level.
| Hold and drag | Aim. The direction is where it goes, the distance is the power |
| Release | Shoot |
| Q | Switch formation: Hold the Wall / Push Forward |
| 1 - 4 | Send Footman, Archer, Torchbearer, Heavy Infantry in order |
| Space | Send a footman (the cheapest one) |
| Esc | Pause. Switching tabs pauses too |
The bottom right corner is the muster area: formation and remaining points on top, the four unit types below. The ones you cannot afford grey out on their own.
There are no dice here. The same arrow always does the same damage: a heavy hit is not luck, it is angle.
The bow's own power, plus how many levels of Sharpened Heads you have bought. Those two set the base.
Sharpened Heads is bow-specific in both how much each level gives and how many levels you get: War Bow +13 per level, Longbow +16 per level, Shortbow +9 per level. A low ceiling does not mean less sharpening to do: the longbow's every stroke is worth two of anyone else's, so it reaches the bottom quickly.
How steeply it falls: at the instant of impact, the faster the arrow is dropping, the more energy it carries and the harder it lands. This is continuous. There is no threshold to sit on; a little steeper is a little more, all the way up.
Whether they blocked it: a flat shot into a shieldbearer's shield sheds nearly all of its force, and very little is left.
One line in the code becomes two different things depending on what it lands on: against a shieldbearer it is a shield break and the shield may as well not exist; against anyone else it is a heavy hit.
Armour Piercing lets an arrow keep flying after it hits. Armoured units eat extra layers:
| Unit | Extra layers | Level needed | War Bow | Longbow | Shortbow |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Heavy Infantry | +1 | 2 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Knight | +1 | 2 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Shieldbearer | +2 | 3 | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Battering Ram | +3 | 4 | ✓ | ||
| Catapult | +3 | 4 | ✓ | ||
| Everyone else | +0 | 1 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
The Armour Piercing ceiling is tied to the bow (War Bow 3, Longbow 4, Shortbow 2), so whether you can get through at all is decided the moment you pick a bow. The three layers on siege engines are a deliberate ceiling: only the longbow, in the whole game, shoots through a battering ram.
A steep shield break takes the layers with it. The steep arrow that punches through the shield punches through those two layers as well and spends only one, so a single steep arrow can thread a row of shieldbearers. It is the one place arcing and Armour Piercing work together, and it is worth remembering.
Engines and knights have no shield. A steep hit on them is a heavy hit, not a shield break, and the layers still count.
Layers only decide whether the arrow keeps flying. They do not change the damage of that hit. An arrow that cannot get through still delivers everything; it simply stops there.
Every spread arrow from Multishot is lighter than the one down the middle. It is close-range burst plus area coverage, not a straight multiplier on damage; once they spread out at distance, hitting one target is actually worse than a single-arrow bow.
Bursting Arrows burst once per arrow, on the first target hit. The blast takes no bonus from a steep fall, but it does get lighter with distance from the centre, and someone standing at the edge takes less than half; a burst set off by a spread arrow is lighter along with the arrow.
A flat shot turned aside by a shield still bursts, but the blast is halved.
Armour Piercing adds no damage. It only lets the arrow keep flying, and every extra body it passes through makes that arrow lighter. The first one hit takes the most, and it falls off from there. Armoured units cost extra layers; see the table above.
The unit's own strength, times the level of Elite Training, times the counter. The counter matters far more than the other two, so bringing the right unit beats training the wrong one (see the troops chapter).
All fixed values, no randomness, no bonuses anywhere. How much wall you lose depends entirely on how much you let through and what it was.
The one thing that accumulates is fire. A fire lit at the foot of the wall by an enemy torchbearer keeps burning and stacks; killing the man who lit it does not stop it, and you can only wait it out. The oil fire your own torchbearer leaves behind is not part of this. That one burns the enemy only.
Troops do not cost gold. They cost muster, which resets every hour. Unspent muster does not carry over and cannot be turned into gold. At most 8 of them stand on the field at once.
The baseline is only 2 points: one archer, or two footmen. Each level of the Levy is +2, up to 10 levels, 22 points fully bought. A garrison is a line you invest in, not something handed to you at the start.
The title card at the start of each hour lists what is coming. That is there to plan your muster with, not for decoration.
The kill score for an enemy is split by the damage each side actually dealt, and who landed the last blow makes no difference. Your share counts toward the grade; the troops' share goes only to the total and the records.
Sending troops does not hurt your grade: the hour's maximum shrinks with your share, so if you did sixty percent of the work the maximum counts sixty percent too. Shoot your own share well and you do not have to give up troops for the sake of a grade. The full rules are in Scoring.
Each of the three late siege units has one troop that answers it:
| Troop | Answers | Damage |
|---|---|---|
| Archer | Catapult | ×4 |
| Torchbearer | Battering Ram | ×4 |
| Heavy Infantry | Knight | ×4 |
| Anything else against those three | ||
The wrong unit still hurts them, just absurdly slowly. Against ordinary infantry it makes no difference who swings.
Hold the Wall keeps your melee against the stonework, taking blows meant for you. Push Forward sends them into the open to engage early and fight them piecemeal, at the cost of being further from your support. Every hour resets to Hold the Wall.
Archers ignore the formation and always stay at the wall.
The first seven hours keep to footmen, torchbearers, shieldbearers, bowmen and heavy infantry. Knights, battering rams and catapults are pushed up later. A unit's first appearance is placed alone at the head of the column.
Same angle, same power, three different lines. The whole difference is how fast the arrow drops, and that curvature decides directly whether you can break a shield.
The dashed line is the height you shoot from, the solid one is the ground. The longbow's arrow has not landed by the right edge of the diagram; the shortbow's is long since in the dirt.
Five archery upgrades, and all three bows cap them differently. That is the real weight of the choice: not just how heavy one arrow is, but which direction the whole run can grow.
| Upgrade | War Bow | Longbow | Shortbow |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sharpened Heads | 7 | 4 | 10 |
| Lighter Limbs | 5 | 6 | 4 |
| Multishot | 3 | 2 | 4 |
| Armour Piercing | 3 | 4 | 2 |
| Bursting Arrows | 4 | 3 | 3 |
Bold is the highest for that row. Reinforced Wall, Elite Training and the Levy do not look at the bow. Those belong to the town.
The price of maxing any one of them is about the same on all three bows; only the number of levels differs. Fewer levels start dearer, more levels climb slowly. No bow is "cheaper" than another.
The bow is chosen at the start and locked for the run. The ceilings, the price curves and the per-level gain of Sharpened Heads are all tied to it, so changing bows would mean throwing away the whole line you have invested in. Decide how the night is going to go while you are still choosing.
Repairing the wall: priced by how much is missing, so the worse it is the dearer it gets. Damage carries over, and putting it off only makes it cost more.
Upgrades: one level at a time, and each level of the same line costs more.
Troops do not take gold; that is a separate resource (see the troops chapter). The bow cannot be changed. So gold has no third destination.
The first five are capped per bow; the last three are the same on all three.
| Upgrade | Effect | War Bow | Longbow | Shortbow |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sharpened Heads | More arrow damage | 7 | 4 | 10 |
| Lighter Limbs | Draw time −12% | 5 | 6 | 4 |
| Multishot | One more spread arrow (spread arrows hit for 60%) | 3 | 2 | 4 |
| Armour Piercing | Arrows pass through 1 more enemy, lighter with every one (armoured units eat extra layers) | 3 | 4 | 2 |
| Bursting Arrows | Bursts once per arrow, lighter further from the centre | 4 | 3 | 3 |
| Reinforced Wall | Wall maximum +160, and repairs the same amount | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| Elite Training | Troop health and damage +30% | 6 | 6 | 6 |
| Levy | +2 muster each hour | 10 | 10 | 10 |
The gold needed to max everything is far beyond what one run can earn. You have to decide which way this run goes: damage and kill in one shot, rate of fire and drown them, troops and push the line out, or pour it all into the wall and grind through to morning.
The garrison is a line you genuinely pay for. Muster starts at 2 points and the Levy costs over four thousand to max, but troop kills still score, and holding them alive pays a bonus on top.
Gold is a resource; score is a performance. The weight on an enemy is how hard it is to handle, not what it pays. The warm gold numbers flying off the screen are bounty, the cold blue ones are score, and the two never get confused.
Kills, every arrow that lands, breaking a shield, a steep heavy hit: all score immediately. Combo counts consecutive hits, not consecutive kills; keep landing them and the multiplier climbs, and it breaks on a miss or on going too long without a new hit. Spread arrows from Multishot naturally miss a few, so the combo is settled per volley rather than per arrow.
Wall intact: how much the wall lost this hour, in proportion.
Accuracy: from your hit rate, and squared, so a low rate earns almost nothing and a high one is clearly worth something. Spread arrows are discounted in the denominator.
Troops alive: troops still standing at the end pay out by their point cost, but do not count toward the grade.
The kill score for an enemy is split by the damage each side actually dealt. Who landed the last blow makes no difference at all. You shot seventy percent off and a troop finished it; the seventy percent is still yours. The other way around, a troop cut seventy percent and you finished it, you get thirty.
Your share counts toward the grade. The troops' share, like troops alive, does not; it goes only to the total and the records. So the grade always measures how well you shot, and troops will not carry it for you.
Nor do troops drag it down: the hour's maximum shrinks with your share. Sixty percent of the work means sixty percent of the maximum, and the rate stays the same. Shoot your own share well; you never have to give up troops for a grade.
Two exceptions worth remembering: the torchbearer who burns himself at the foot of the wall, whose last blow belongs to nobody, and the split follows the damage both sides did before it; and the combo multiplier applies to your share only.
The grade is your score for the hour against a theoretical maximum, derived from the force actually fielded that hour.
| Grade | Threshold |
|---|---|
| S | 90% of maximum or better |
| A | 75% of maximum or better |
| B | 55% of maximum or better |
| C | everything else |
The no-preview bonus goes to the total and the records and does not touch the grade.
The board lives on this device only, five entries per difficulty. Every hour you hold is written once, so you do not have to reach the end or the collapse; giving up partway, refreshing, or closing the tab never wastes what you already did. One run takes only one slot, and a lower score does not overwrite a higher one.
Only on Easy, decided before the run and locked for it. Hard always has the arc preview off.
What is turned off is the layer showing where the arrow will land. The anchor, the drag line, the power arc and the full-draw ring all stay. You still see how much you drew and at what angle. The only thing you do not know is the result.
The whole hour's score is multiplied by ×1.4. Expect your accuracy to fall by about a third.
With the preview off, the threshold where the screen calls your accuracy low is loosened to match.
Difficulty only changes what failure costs and how tough the enemy is. Nothing about play changes: the moves, the counters and the scoring rules are identical on both.
| Difficulty | Enemy health | Wall on a retry | Arc preview |
|---|---|---|---|
| See the Night Through (Easy) | 86% of full | refilled to at least 50% | your choice |
| Hold to the Last (Hard) | 100% of full | exactly as you entered it |
The board keeps a separate list per difficulty; they never mix.
After the wall comes down you can hold the hour again. Gold, upgrades, the bow and your running total all roll back to the state you entered it in. Nothing earned or bought that hour counts.
On hard, holding all twenty hours opens the next day. Hold day two and day three opens, and so on. Any day you have opened you can always go back and hold again, and each keeps its own records. Easy has none of this.
Every day builds on the first, and it is weighted toward the end: the opening hour is much the same, and only the final hour is at full strength. The table below is the final hour.
| Day | Enemy health | Enemy numbers | Enemy damage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Day One | baseline | baseline | baseline |
| Day Two | ×1.50 | ×1.35 | ×1.20 |
| Day Three | ×2.00 | ×1.70 | ×1.40 |
More of them also means more gold, so your upgrade curve does not fall behind entirely. Health and damage carry no such feedback, and that is where the real difficulty is. The gaps between them shorten too, leaving you less room to breathe.
Units come out earlier on the later days, but the three siege units have a floor they will not come before: knights no earlier than hour seven, rams hour ten, catapults hour thirteen. Any earlier and a bow whose armor-piercing cap is too low could not even field the troop that counters them, which is not difficulty but a dead end.
Each day keeps its own top five; they never mix. Days you have not opened do not appear in the records.
No. The web page is the whole game. There is no installer and no plugin, and it is not Flash. You can add it to your home screen and get a real app out of it, but that is extra; it plays the same either way.
Yes, held sideways. The whole game is press, drag the way you want to shoot, and release, which was built for touch from the start. Held upright it asks you to turn: this is a battle fought along the ground, and sideways is the only way to see how far off the enemy still is.
Free, and no. No sign up, no purchases, no ads, and nothing at all locked behind money.
20 of them, one run from first light to deep night. About an hour if it goes well, and the first time it usually will not: most people fall somewhere in the middle. You can hold an hour again, but gold, the wall and every upgrade roll back to the state you entered it in, so a retry buys you nothing.
There is the levy. Each hour gives you points that reset when it ends, and you spend them sending Footman, Archer, Torchbearer, Heavy Infantry down to hold the line. Each of the three siege units has one defender that counters it: get the pairing right and it goes easily, get it wrong and the hour hurts, though it is never unwinnable. You can also send nobody and hold the wall alone.
A flat shot glances off the shield. Only an arrow falling at a steep angle punches through, so raise the bow and let it come down from above. The more curved a bow shoots the easier that is, and the three bows differ a great deal here.
You pick one at the start and it is locked for the whole run. The ceiling and the price of all five archery upgrades are tied to the bow you are holding.
War Bow The standard issue. Middling arc, middling rhythm, never at a disadvantage anywhere.
Longbow Enormously heavy per shot; three arrows put down heavy infantry. The arrow flies flat and far and is easy to aim. The cost is a slow draw, and it cannot throw a steep arc, which makes shieldbearers a real problem.
Shortbow Fast to shoot, and one arrow still drops a footman, so it suits a swarm well. The arc is curved and distant targets are hard to aim, but that curve is exactly what breaks a shield from above.
Your records live in your own browser and are never uploaded, so the same browser on the same device will still have them, and another device or another browser will be empty. On iOS an app added to the home screen has storage separate from Safari, so opening it there starts you over.
They arrived before it was light. This town is not worth naming. It is a bar between two mountains, and the road north runs through here and nowhere else, so they have to pass and you have to stop them. Three days ago the last messengers rode out. A horse came back the next day with an empty saddle. The commander counted everyone in town who could hold a bow. Eleven. Four were apprentices from the smithy. Two were not yet sixteen. Three died the first night, seven the second. This morning, you are what is left. The commander did not count again. He had every torch on the tower lit, so that anyone in the town who looked up would know: someone is still standing up there.
You have twenty hours to hold. The sky runs from first light to deep night: the sun climbs overhead and sinks again, the shadows stretch, the lamps in the town come on one by one and go out one by one as the wall stops holding. Cracks carry into the next hour unless you repair them yourself.
By the thirteenth hour you will be certain of one thing: no relief is coming.
After that there is only one thing left to do: last until it is light again.
Author · Roy Yen
Years ago, back when Flash was still around, there was a side-on siege game. An archer stood on a wall, drew, loosed, and kept the crowd outside. Then Flash was shut down and the game went with the whole era. The name will not come back to me, and it is not on the internet either. What survived was one idea: one person, one bow, one wall.
This is built from that idea rather than restored from that game. What was left in memory really was only that much; every other rule here (muster, counters, arcs, scoring) was designed from scratch. It is not that game, but if you also remember the figure standing on that wall, this is where it still is.
By · mrpoly, SketchyLogic, cynicmusic
The town is held at the twentieth hour and it ends there, but the game does not stop here. Whenever there is something new worth adding, it gets added.
Balance: which bow is miserable in which hour, which upgrade feels like nothing once bought, which enemy has only one answer the moment it shows up. These get worn down over time. The goal is not to make it easier, it is to make every choice worth a moment's thought.
More things: new units, new ways to hold, more decisions to make on the field. Everything gets one question first: does it give the player another trade-off? Anything that only raises numbers does not come in.
Two-player online: the one I want most. Two people as opponents, not teammates. Each defends a wall and does two things at once: shooting from your own wall while sending troops to break theirs. Whoever's wall falls first loses.
The hard part is the "at once". Muster spent on defence makes the force you send thin; go all in on attack and your own wall rests on you alone. And the person opposite is alive and will aim at the mistake you made last time, unlike an enemy following a roster.
But this one depends on how many people play. Online matches only work if there are live people to match with: if it is just you, matchmaking finds nobody and the finished feature has no one to play against. So what decides whether it gets built is not the code, it is how many people are playing this game.
If you want to see it, the most useful thing right now is to pass the game on. Every extra person standing on a wall brings it a little closer.
Updates go straight out. Refreshing the page is the newest version; nothing to download again. If you installed it, the next cold start picks it up.
Thank you for holding this far. We will meet again next version, after it gets light.
Completely free, no sign-up, it plays in a browser. Scan the code below on a phone, or just send them the link.
On a phone, adding it to the home screen turns it into a real app: fullscreen, landscape, and it holds without a network. The how is in the bottom row of the home screen.
Records stay in your own browser and are never uploaded, so there is no worldwide board to compare against. If you want to compare, turn your best run into a card and send it over: whose grade is higher, and who reached which hour.
孤城弓影是一場橫向的守城戰。轉成橫的，你才看得見敵人從多遠的地方走過來。