CROWNHOLD
Free tower defense game · plays in your browser · made with Opus 5
Play CROWNHOLD free in your browser: a tower defense game with nothing to download and no sign-up. Its creator files it under Medieval. Opus 5 wrote the code; the prompt that produced it is on this page. It works on a phone as well as a desktop.
About CROWNHOLD
CROWNHOLD is a medieval tower defence strategy game: thirty roads across three acts, with enemies marching from a skull banner to your gate while you raise towers along the way. Every one that gets through costs a crown, and at zero crowns the road is lost.
Tap or click a flagged plot to build one of four towers, and give the masons a few seconds. Archers loose one arrow at a time and reach flyers, barracks put three soldiers physically in the road, mages ignore armour, bombards flatten crowds but cannot touch the sky. Each rises through three tiers as the campaign opens them up, then commits to one of eight permanent branches, and every branch sells two abilities of three ranks that fly as pennants on the tower. Reinforcements come every ten seconds and hold a wolf for about twelve; Rain of Fire comes every eighty. Every road gives you a purse and a road full of building slots, and never enough gold to fill them - a goblin is worth two coins, so which bends you fortify is the whole game. Nothing moves until you call the wave, and every call after the first pays for the time you leave on the clock. Sixteen roads hide a set piece: a sealed road that opens mid-battle, a cage that breaks, the King's men arriving, a burning sky. Six champions arrive with the road shaking and a word for you. Twenty-eight creatures, each one modelled and lit rather than drawn flat - hover or tap any of them to read its health, armour and tricks, and watch for the shamans walking inside a crowd healing everything around them. Four ways to play every road: Normal, Veteran, Heroic and Iron, with stars that buy permanent upgrades in the King's Armoury. Plays with a mouse on a desktop or a thumb on a phone held sideways. Build a barracks on the first bend: archers alone hold nothing.
How was CROWNHOLD made?
The prompt behind CROWNHOLD
Built with Claude Code across several sessions, with every sound and almost every picture generated in code. A three-level demo came first, then a 30-road campaign, then play-test rounds that rebuilt towers, archers and balance from the user's notes. Later rounds added champion entrances, scripted set pieces, an Iron mode, a hand-painted world atlas, touch, and finally a 3D bake pipeline that models all twenty-eight creatures as joint trees and renders them offline to sprite sheets. v3.1 is the economy and the geometry, rebuilt against the numbers the genre actually runs on. The wave composer used to price each creature off its bounty, which meant gold could not be changed without silently resizing every wave in the game; threat is now what a creature costs you to kill - health, armour, magic resistance, speed, crowns - so the two are independent. With that untangled the bounties came down by half (a goblin is two coins against a seventy-coin archer tower), the starting purse is written per road rather than derived from a formula, and calling the very first wave pays nothing, because it was never a decision. Early on the purse builds your defence and kills are pocket change; by the third act kills are more than half your income. The maps changed to match. Build plots were being placed by farthest-point selection, which spreads them evenly and is blind to whether a spot can see any road at all; each candidate is now scored by how much road it watches inside a tower's reach, which lands them in the insides of the bends without being told to. There are fourteen to twenty-two a road now, and the worst plot on any of the thirty maps still watches 230 pixels of road. The roads themselves were a straight line with random jitter on each point, which makes a wobble rather than a curve; every run now carries one coherent S, capped so two bands never crowd, which is what leaves a pocket a tower fits into. The wave banner moved to the mouth of the road where the enemy actually comes from - which meant routing the sweeps clear of the corners the interface owns, because a road entering under the buttons can never carry a banner you could click. The first road is a short two-band hairpin now rather than a long serpentine. Also: healers and warders are held out of the walking pool entirely and can only arrive attached to the biggest group in a wave, timed to be inside the crowd - across all 377 waves in the campaign, none of them ever arrives as a block of its own. And the atlas now inks its road out to the next checkpoint when you come back from a road you held, instead of the reward simply being there.
Categories and tags
Questions about CROWNHOLD
5
- Is CROWNHOLD free to play?
- Yes. CROWNHOLD is free, runs in your browser, and needs no account. Nothing to download, no plugin, no sign-up — open the page and play.
- Do I need to download or install CROWNHOLD?
- No. CROWNHOLD runs entirely in the browser on desktop and on a phone. There is nothing to install and no launcher to sign in to.
- Which AI model made CROWNHOLD?
- CROWNHOLD was written by Opus 5, a model from Anthropic, using Claude Code. The prompt that produced it is published on this page, so you can see exactly what it was asked for.
- What is CROWNHOLD like?
- It is a tower defense game, filed by its creator under Medieval and Fantasy and Castle and Campaign and Singleplayer. CROWNHOLD is a medieval tower defence strategy game: thirty roads across three acts, with enemies marching from a skull banner to your gate while you raise towers along the way.
- Does CROWNHOLD keep a high score?
- Yes. Any score CROWNHOLD reports goes to the leaderboard under the game, and you do not need an account for it to count.
Version 3.1 · updated 2026-09-07