Garden Guard
A segmented caterpillar winds down through a field of toadstools toward your patch. Shoot it apart, swat the spiders and beetles, and keep the garden alive wave after wave.
How to play
- Arrows/WASD move
- Space/Z fire
- P pause
- Enter or tap to start · M to mute
Touch controls appear automatically on phones and tablets. Your best score is saved in this browser and only reaches a leaderboard if you submit it (privacy). Press the fullscreen button for the full cabinet effect.
About this game
In Garden Guard you play a little potted sprout at the bottom of a vegetable patch, firing up at a caterpillar that zigzags down through the toadstools. Every segment you hit turns into a new toadstool, and a hit in the middle splits the caterpillar into two. The seasons change as the waves go by, from Spring through Summer and Autumn to Dusk.
Goal: Destroy every caterpillar segment to clear the wave, and score as much as you can before your three lives run out.
Garden Guard is an original mushroom-field shooter built for the browser in the style of 1980s arcade cabinets: pixel art, a chiptune soundtrack and CRT scanlines, all generated in code. It is free, has no ads and needs no download or account.
What’s inside
- Endless waves; from wave 2 extra single heads drop in alongside the main caterpillar
- Spider (300, 600 or 900 points), Beetle (200, two hits) and Moth (1,000)
- Twin Shot seed power-up: two shots at once for 10 seconds
- Extra life every 12,000 points, up to 6 lives
- Wave bonus of 250 points times the wave number
- Players
- 1 player
- On a phone
- Drag anywhere to move the sprout without covering it with your finger; it fires as long as a finger is down, and the button at the top centre pauses.
- Round length
- A wave takes about 1-2 minutes, and most games last 5-15 minutes.
Tips
- The spider is worth 900 points when you shoot it up close, and those shots also drop a Twin Shot seed.
- Only two of your shots can be on screen at once, so you fire faster when the target is close.
- Shoot moths quickly: they turn toadstools into spore caps that send the caterpillar diving straight down into the patch.
- Once a caterpillar reaches the patch, new heads crawl in from the sides after a flashing arrow warning, so finish the wave fast.
Questions
How many hits does a toadstool take?
Four. Each one you clear is worth 1 point, or 5 if a moth turned it into a spore cap.
What happens to damaged toadstools when I lose a life?
They are replanted at full size, and each one replanted is worth 5 points.
Where do beetles come from?
From wave 2, a beetle drops straight down when the patch has only a few toadstools left, planting new ones as it falls. It takes two hits.
Leaderboards Today’s challenge
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Scores are highest first. Your best is read from this browser when you submit; three initials, arcade style.
