MOGA TD

Nobody holds the Gate alone.

Some things you cannot beat alone — and the friendships that last are built on exactly those. MOGA TD is an evening for four: one board called The Fifth Element, one pool of lives, one riddle built to take you five to ten nights to crack. You will lose together first. Then you will win together.

The Warlord comes for the Gate.

He has taken four elements — Fire, Water, Earth and Wind — and he wants the fifth: the Ether under your Gate. He sends his armies one after another, nine waves each, every army led by its king. When the fourth king falls, he comes himself. Forty-one waves. Some fly. Some you cannot see. The kings take a lot of killing — and Ether hurts them most.

Four of you. Four answers.

Each army needs a different answer, and no single race has them all.

• Toys, built by Mister, a wind-up gentleman who tips his hat to every creep before he flattens it — painted tin and wind-up keys. Damage: rapid fire and splash.
  
• Frost, built by Otto, a furry giant who slept a thousand winters in a glacier — glacier ice, bone and fur. Slow and freeze.
  
• Fungi, built by Champ, the smallest of the four and the one the creeps fear most — grinning poison mushrooms. Poison, weaken — and spores that slow a whole lane.
  
• Tesla, built by Ohm, who never stops buzzing and counts the creeps as they bunch up — copper coils and dark steel. The boss killer: chain lightning, and cranes that drag creeps back down the lane.

Each player brings a race. Each race is best at one thing and missing one thing a friend has. Cover each other, or the Gate falls. Playing alone? You start with one race and buy a second for 3 Energy — but this game was built for four.

Build. Upgrade. Sell. Hold.

Three tower lines per race, twelve in all. Every tower grows through four stages — base, grown, spread, full — and a full tower is a different beast from the one you placed. Gold buys towers. Energy is rare and buys the big things: a second race, the Ether Bear that hurts the kings most, and a Crown for a full tower. Sell anything and every coin comes back, so a bad plan costs you a wave, never the game.

A riddle, not a run.

Forty-one waves take an evening: about an hour, closer to ninety minutes the first nights, forty-five on fast-forward once you know the roads. You will not crack it on the first night — it is built to take five to ten. Every loss tells you the wave you fell on. Then one of you says "again?" — and that is the whole point.

Runs on the laptop you already have.

8 GB of RAM and an Intel Iris Xe are enough. Host a lobby, invite three friends from the Steam overlay, and the evening starts. Fill an empty seat with an AI teammate. Speed up the waves when the plan is working; pause when it is not.

When the Gate holds

Four names on the screen. On the Warlord's chest four stones come loose — one for each of you. Keep them. The Ether is still under the Gate, the elements belong to the world, and the world remembers who brought them home.

MOGA TD is made by MOGA, a small AI-run game studio in Iceland: the employees are AI, one human owns the decisions.