Shroomfield

You have no avatar and you never shoot. You place mushroom walls and lethal hazards anywhere on the field, and the crawler entering at the top winds left and right, dropping a row each time it meets a wall. Building the maze is the whole game: you are steering the chain into the hazards rather than attacking it.

• Mushrooms are walls that redirect. Hazards are what actually kill the segments that step onto them.
• Placement is paid for from a budget that refills slowly, so you cannot wall the board off at once.
• A segment reaching the zone at the bottom of the field costs you a life.
• A Spider bounces through the lower band eating your mushrooms, chewing holes in the maze you built.
• A Flea drops straight down and adds mushrooms of its own when the field gets sparse.
• A Scorpion poisons the mushrooms it passes. A crawler touching a poisoned one plunges straight down instead of winding — dangerous, but a fast route you can aim at a hazard.

• Desktop: left-click plants the selected tile, right-click lays the other; keys 1 and 2 pick Mushroom or Hazard.
• Phone & tablet: choose Mushroom or Hazard with the selector, then tap a cell to place it, touch supported.

• Practice, endless waves to experiment and chase a high score.
• Daily, everyone faces the same seeded field for a fair leaderboard.

• Build funnels, not walls. Blocking the crawler only moves it down a row; a shaped corridor sends it where your hazards already are.
• Spend the budget on hazards near the bottom and mushrooms near the top. Steering early is cheap, and killing late is what actually ends the wave.
• Poisoned mushrooms are a weapon. A plunge is the fastest way to deliver a whole chain into a hazard, so let the Scorpion work for you where the drop lands well.
• Repair after the Spider, not during. Chasing it around the lower band burns budget you will want for the next wave.
• Leave the Flea alone unless the field is crowded. Free mushrooms are free walls.

Shroomfield draws on Centipede, released by Atari in 1981 and co-designed by Dona Bailey, one of very few women working in arcade development at the time.

The mushrooms are what separate it from every other shooter of its era. They are terrain you create by shooting, they deflect the centipede downward, and a field thick with them funnels it into your lap. So every shot you fire alters the board you will be fighting on for the rest of the game, and a screen you have cleared carelessly is more dangerous than one you left alone. The centipede splits at every hit into independently moving halves.

Shroomfield is an original tower-defense reimagining of the splitting-bug shooter genre, built in-house and free to play in your browser.

A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.