The objective

Crabs and other beach creatures come ashore in waves to smash your sand buildings. Hold the beach. A stronghold is a Castle or a Garrison, the two buildings that command the land they stand on, and it is game over only when no stronghold is left standing anywhere. So losing a shore costs you that shore, not the run.

Your opening crew

Every run starts the same way: 🪖 three army men, 👷 three builders and 🧹 three cleaners already on the island beside your Castle, plus your first coins. Nothing has to be bought before you can defend, build or earn, so spending every coin on soldiers can never leave you stranded.

The resource loop

• 🪙 Coins buy every toy, and dead crabs are the income: 🧹 cleaners carry the corpses back to the Castle, and a fresh one pays a full coin while a rotting one pays a few silver.
• 🪖 Soldiers shoot, 🧹 cleaners fetch, 👷 builders raise and repair. 🗼 A Watch Tower holds four men who shoot further and faster from its battlements; 🏯 a Garrison is a stronghold, so it commands the land and you can deploy wherever one stands.
• 🔶 Amber is the second loop: melt your own fallen with the ☀️ sun ray, then recast men or plate the squad in resin.

Waves and shores

• Waves arrive on a countdown and get bigger: build the line before the timer runs out.
• The world is one continuous map of five shores. Sail a boat across, land three army men and raise that shore's Castle: finishing it is what starts its waves.
• Undiscovered water sits under cloud. Sail into the haze to scout it, and press M for the chart.
• The pause menu keeps 💾 save states of the run, and F5 / F9 quick-save and quick-load.

The dock

• Every command is a button in the bar along the bottom. Hover one for what it does; the badge bottom-right is its price or its count, and a button that has gone dead says why in the chip just above the bar.
• The small number top-right of a slot is its key: press 1 to 9 to fire that slot, wherever you have dragged it.
• Drag a button to reorder it. Nothing is ever removed by a slip: dropping a button off the dock snaps it back, and its × asks once before it goes.
• Hover the 🪙 or 🔶 chip in the HUD for a dropdown of everything that resource buys. Rows you cannot afford stay greyed but still describe themselves.