Mini Skirmish

Lay out a base, wall it in, and find out which raider type your plan forgot about

Single player
action
arcade

▶ Play Mini Skirmish Loads here in the page. No download, no account.

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About Mini Skirmish

Mini Skirmish is a base defence game drawn like something from the back of an exercise book, and underneath it is a layout puzzle. Each level gives you a build timer, a grid and a fixed set of pieces — a town hall, a pile of walls, cannons and archer towers — then raiders come in from all four edges at once and take your plan apart.

The town hall goes down first; nothing else can be placed until it is. After that the decisions are geometry: what sits inside the walls, what sits outside as bait, and which stretch of wall you are quietly hoping they break.

Clearing a level moves you up, and they run to ninety-nine. The grid grows, you get more walls and towers, and new pieces unlock along the way — mortars around level four, bomb traps at eight, springs at twelve, wizard towers at sixteen. Three stars are on offer: the hall surviving, half the raiders killed, and half your buildings still standing. A bare, minimal base that survives earns one of them.

What is different about this version

The raiders do not all beeline for your town hall. A building only counts as a target while a straight line still reaches it from the edge of the map, so walls work by cutting sight lines rather than by being an obstacle course. The hall itself is deliberately deprioritised — attackers treat it as roughly twice as far as any other building, so an ordinary hut left in the open pulls the pack away from it. The bigger quirk is the breach: the first wall segment that falls is remembered, and from then on every raider still outside funnels towards walls near that one spot rather than picking its own way in. And bombers only ever target walls, so build none at all and they arrive, find nothing to blow up, and die on the spot.

How to play Mini Skirmish

Place the town hall before anything else. Everything is locked until it is down.
Spend the build timer laying out walls, cannons and archer towers on the grid.
When the timer ends, raiders spawn on all four edges and walk in.
Breakers fight in melee; archers shoot over walls from four tiles away.
Giants are slow and enormously tough; bombers ignore everything except walls.
Your towers fire on their own — there is nothing to control once the raid starts.
Keep the hall standing until the last raider is dead to win the level.

Controls

Desktop	Click a piece in the tray, then click a grid square to place it.
Phone or tablet	Tap a piece, then tap the square you want it on.
Players	One player. Any other characters on screen are run by the game.

Strategy

Because of the breach rule, a perfectly even fortress is the wrong shape. Somewhere in your wall breaks first, and once it does the whole raid pours through it — so decide where rather than letting chance decide. Make one stretch slightly thinner, put it where two cannons and an archer tower already overlap, and the weakness becomes a corridor.

Bait is the other half of the layout. Raiders prefer anything with a clear line in, and the hall counts as double the distance, so a couple of cheap buildings outside the wall will hold part of the pack for several seconds doing nothing useful. That time is free damage. It also splits the arrival, which stops a wave of breakers stacking on one wall tile.

Know which threat each piece answers. Enemy archers shoot from four tiles, which your archer towers comfortably outrange, so towers set back behind the wall beat towers on it. Cannons hit harder but reload slowly and cover less ground, which makes them funnel pieces rather than perimeter pieces. Walls are a genuine trade: build them and bombers become a real threat, skip them and bombers die on arrival while everything else walks straight to your hall. On the early levels that second option is worth trying once, to see how fast a wall-less base falls.

Mistakes that cost you the game

Sealing the base evenly all the way round. The first hole becomes the funnel wherever it happens, so an even wall gives your towers a random job.
Putting archer towers on the wall line. Their range is wasted and enemy archers get to shoot them from four tiles out.
Placing the hall in a corner for safety. Corners cut the directions your own towers can cover too.
Spending the whole timer on walls with nothing left to shoot with. Walls do not kill anything.

Tips

Leave a deliberate weak seam and aim everything at it.
Cheap buildings outside the wall are not wasted — they buy time and split the pack.
Mortars, once unlocked, are slow and splash-heavy, which suits a funnel and suits nothing else.
Traps are one-use and trigger on contact, so bury them just inside where you expect the breach.
A layout that worked at level three needs rethinking by level eight, not just scaling up.
Hard adds raider count, health and spawn rate, so it punishes thin coverage more than bad walls.