Arcane Grid — Turn-Based Elemental Tactics

What is Arcane Grid — Turn-Based Elemental Tactics

Arcane Grid puts a single spellcaster in the middle of a six-by-six board and sends waves of enemies at him from the twenty border squares. Every square you do not occupy holds one of six elements: fire, water, earth, lightning, light or shadow. Tap one and the game highlights every square of the same element joined to it edge to edge. Three or more, and the Cast button wakes up. The spell fires, the spent tiles are replaced, and only then do the enemies move. Nothing happens while you think, and there is no clock running anywhere on the screen.

The same tiles are both your ammunition and your terrain. Fire hits hard but only one square away; lightning is weaker and sweeps the whole row and column of the square you cast from; earth deals no damage at all and drops two stone walls that stand for three turns. Cast beside a different element and the two react: water next to lightning gives Shock, light next to shadow gives Nova. Reactions hit every enemy at once and pay forty points each, so the group you leave behind matters as much as the one you spend. Wave five brings the first boss.

How to play

1. Tap an elemental square to select it; the game outlines every square of the same element joined to it by shared edges and shows how many there are.
2. With three or more highlighted, press Cast to fire that element's spell; with fewer, tap a neighbouring square to swap the two and pass the turn.
3. Enemies then take one orthogonal step towards you, or strike for their damage value if already adjacent, so each action of yours costs one of theirs.
4. Clear every enemy to finish the wave and collect fifty points per wave number; the run ends when your twenty hit points reach zero.

Strategies that work

• Lightning is the only spell with no range limit: it damages every enemy sharing the row or column of the square you cast from. Your spellcaster sits on the third row and third column, and enemies converging on you line up with those axes, so a lightning group placed there often catches three at once, six squares away included.
• Enemies step onto a neighbouring square only if it genuinely shortens their distance to you, and they never route around obstacles. One standing directly above, below, left or right of you has exactly one such square, so a single earth wall on it freezes that enemy for three turns. Diagonal attackers need both routes blocked.
• Damage rises by two for every complete group of three, so a five-tile cast hits exactly as hard as a three-tile one; only at six does the bonus step up again. With four or five tiles and no reaction beside them, spend the group now on a target that will die rather than wait for a sixth tile.
• Six pairs react: fire with water, earth with fire, lightning with water, light with shadow, earth with lightning, fire with light. Shadow answers only to light, and light is also fire's partner, so a light group wedged between fire and shadow triggers both at once: eighty points and fifteen damage to the whole board.
• Earth is the one spell that deals no damage whatsoever; cast it for its walls or for the Magma and Quake reactions it enables. Shadow carries the opposite trap, teleporting survivors to a random border square, and the nearest border squares are only two steps from you, so it can drag a distant enemy to your door.

A little history

Arcane Grid was written for this site and has no older version elsewhere. It belongs to two puzzle families at once. The first is the connected-group board, where a tap runs a flood fill across squares that share an edge and the size of the component decides what you get. The second is the small tactical defence, where movement is measured in Manhattan distance and every action of yours grants the opposition one of its own. Grafting them together produces the tension: the elements that arm your next spell are also the ground your enemies walk on.

Frequently asked questions