Six at the Gate
You and six others against three defended gates. Nobody is replaced. Whoever is still standing walks to the next gate with you.
What it is
You lead a warband of six against the outer gate, then the inner gate, then the keep. You control the hero directly — there is no command layer, no selecting units, no building anything. Where you stand is how you give orders.
A gate can't be touched while a single defender still holds the line in front of it. Break the line and the gate becomes the problem: you're stood in the open, under a wall, with archers who have stopped being interrupted.
The warband doesn't come back
This is the rule the whole game is built on. Your six carry between gates and are never replenished. Survivors are patched up fully; the dead stay dead. Arriving at the keep alone is a thing that can happen, and it should feel like the disaster it is.
Your hero recovers strength based on how many of them are still standing — not a flat amount per gate. An earlier version granted a fixed heal, which meant losing everyone cost you nothing at the exact moment it should have cost the most.
How to play
- Move the heroDrag / WASD
- Aim the warband — they attack whoever you're nearestYour position
- Hold the line, or send them forwardStance toggle
- Choose your six before a runComposition
The ring on the ground marks the target your warband is committed to. Positioning is the aiming mechanism — there's nothing else to learn.
Who you bring changes what works
Six chosen from four types, and the choice sticks between runs. Spearmen are the steady baseline. Shieldbearers take a beating and hit softly. Berserkers hit twice as hard and die about as fast. Skirmishers fight at range and cannot hold a line at all.
None of them is an upgrade on another — they're sidegrades, deliberately held within a narrow power band. What changes is which stance is correct. A shield wall can be sent forward almost for free. A band of berserkers is going to die either way, so you may as well maximise the damage on the way.
Watch for the captain
Gold ring, plume. While it stands, every defender near it swings noticeably faster. It's the one thing on the field that asks you a question mid-fight — and the answer depends on who you brought.
Build log
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Sound, synthesised rather than sampled — oscillators and a single noise buffer, so it adds no weight to the file and nothing to download.
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Staggered the warband's durability across the roster. Six identical bodies engage together, take identical damage and die together — at one value nobody died all run, and a little lower the entire warband vanished inside four seconds. There is no number between those two outcomes, so the fix was to stop making them identical.
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The focus ring now draws over everything. It was logically correct and completely invisible: at this camera angle the body it marks stands on top of it. A marker that exists to prevent confusion, causing exactly the confusion it existed to prevent.
Credits and licences
Built on three.js, used under the MIT licence with the copyright notice retained in the shipped file. Typefaces are licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence. All audio is generated at runtime by the Web Audio API.
Six at the Gate is original work by Launchway Games, and the only game here that didn't begin life as something else.