How to play & controls Tiny Garden Defense

Tiny Garden Defense is played on a 12-by-8 grid where a dirt path runs from a hole at the edge to a bed of 10 flowers. Its four towers have three levels each and barely overlap: the sunflower fires quick single shots and hits moths, the sprinkler soaks and slows every ground pest in reach at once, the beehive's bees sting an area and also reach moths, and the pepper lands one heavy, armor-piercing shot on ground pests. Aimed towers always pick the pest furthest along toward the flowers.

Each pest asks for a different answer: ants are quick and fragile, snails slow and tough, beetles armored, caterpillars split in two when beaten, moths fly over the path, and a mole closes waves 5 and 10. Since the 2026-10-10 rules update every wave has a theme announced in advance, and sprinklers water the towers beside them, so where you plant matters as much as what.

There are five gardens: Front Yard, Veggie Patch, Pondside, Greenhouse and Meadow. Each round is a fixed 30-step-per-second simulation the server can replay from your actions, so everyone shares one daily garden and ranking.

Goal

Plant defenses along the path and stop 10 waves of pests to win. Lose all 10 flowers and the garden falls.

How it works

1. Pick Today's Garden, Practice Garden or Hard Garden (15 waves, unranked). You start with 150 coins.
2. Choose a defense at the bottom, then click a grass tile next to the path to plant it.
3. When ready, press Start first wave. Pests follow the path toward the flowers.
4. Spend kill rewards on more defenses, or click a planted defense to upgrade (up to Lv 3) or sell it.
5. The next wave comes on its own after a short break. Call it early for coins and bonus points.

Modes

Today's Garden

The UTC date picks one of the five gardens and all 10 waves, so everyone plays the same round until 00:00 UTC. Rounds are ranked after the server replays them.

Practice Garden

A random seed with the normal 10 waves. The preview gives exact counts per pest (Today's Garden rounds to the nearest five); unranked.

Hard Garden

15 waves with moles on waves 5, 10 and 15; pest health grows 34% of base per wave instead of 26%, and waves are larger. Random seed, unranked; a win puts a 🏅 on that garden.

Challenge (⚔)

Opened from the ⚔ beside a ranking entry or a shared link: the same garden, waves and rules version as the other player, with their score as the target. Ranked only if it is today's garden on current rules.

Controls

Tips

• Moths ignore the path and fly straight in; only sunflowers and beehives can hit them.
• Beetles are armored, so use peppers (they pierce armor). Moles show up on waves 5 and 10.
• Selling refunds 70% of what you spent. If you win, leftover flowers and coins also score.
• Practice Garden is random and not ranked. On a phone held upright the map turns 90° for bigger tiles.
• There are five gardens (Front Yard, Veggie Patch, Pondside, Greenhouse, Meadow). Saving one earns stars by flowers left (up to ★★★) in My gardens; a Hard Garden win earns 🏅. In the Greenhouse moths arrive fast, so get sunflowers and beehives early.
• Stick/D-pad: cell; A/×: build/select; LB/RB: tower type; X/□: upgrade; Y/△: sell; B/○: cancel; RT: wave; LT: speed; START: pause.

Strategy tips

Build before the clock starts

Nothing moves until you press Start first wave, so spend all 150 starting coins first. Wave 1 is only ants and snails and no moth arrives before wave 3, so the opening buy can focus on path coverage.

Read the theme line

The wave preview names the next theme and its counter: ant swarm (ants at 0.6× spacing) calls for beehives and sprinklers; caterpillar brood, beehive splash; moth cloud, sunflowers and beehives; armored march, peppers. In a normal game waves 2–4 are swarm, brood and moths in seed order (never moths on wave 2); waves 6–9 bring all four, including the only armored march.

Measure the moth line

Moths fly straight from the entrance to the flowers at 1.9 tiles per second, faster than any walker. On the Greenhouse that line is 7.6 tiles against a 30-tile path, about four seconds of flight; elsewhere it is 10.8–11.7 tiles. Before a moth wave the preview shows what share of the line your sunflowers and beehives reach.

One sprinkler, eight neighbors

Any other tower in the eight cells around a sprinkler fires on a 0.8× cooldown, about 21–24% more shots after rounding. Watering does not stack and sprinklers do not water each other, so ring one sprinkler with attackers. In my test bot, turning watering off cut the preview-reading strategy from 38 to 35 wins in 40 seeds.

Armor comes off every hit

Every non-pepper hit is cut by the target's armor, to a minimum of 1: 3 for beetles, 2 for the mole. Against a beetle a level-1 sprinkler's 6 becomes 3 and a level-1 sunflower's 10 becomes 7, while the pepper's 90, 150 or 240 lands whole.

Stop caterpillars early

A beaten caterpillar leaves two larvae 0.15 tiles either side of where it fell, each moving 1.7 tiles per second. Killed near the flowers, it drops two fast pests right in front of them, so on brood waves front-load your damage; a beehive's 0.9-tile splash hits both larvae.

Plan for the burrow

The mole's 1,300 base health becomes 2,652 on wave 5 and 4,342 on wave 10; it has 2 armor and eats 3 flowers. The first time it drops below half it burrows for 1.5 seconds, untargetable, unslowed and 1.3× faster, and shots in flight miss. Keep towers past where it usually reaches half.

Coins left are points

An early call pays 1 coin and 2 points per whole second left of the 18-second break, which starts when the current wave's last pest appears, not when the field clears. On a win each flower scores 100 and each unspent coin 1, so a 45-coin tower that saves a flower pays off; a loss scores neither.

Updated: 2026-10-10

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