Biscuit Brigade: Hagan's Last Stand

In this game, your mission is to protect Brightvale's most treasured and sacred possessions: cookies. Okay, not really; when he was young, King Skarl always used a batch of clockwork minions to steal his brother Hagan's cookies, and the latter needs you to help him protect them in this yummiest battle ever.

How To Play

To safeguard the cookies, you have to place obstacles in the toys' way. You have walls and a variety of towers at your disposal. Initially, the only defence you have for your cookies is a little castle around them, down in the lower right-hand corner of the screen; you have time to build towers and walls to further defend them, however, as Skarl has to build his toys before he can send them after the cookies.

King Skarl's toys come from the upper left-hand corner. You can't attack them while they're still in the chest, but when he releases them it's total war. The toys come in all sorts of forms and sizes; some types are fast, some slow and durable.

In every game, there are twenty waves of toys to deal with; as the wave number increases, so do the amount of toys sent at you. Waves are released steadily, not instantly, so most of the toys are spread out from one another.

When a toy manages to tear through your castle walls, each toy will try to pick up a cookie and carry it back to Skarl's chest; if you destroy one while it's carrying a cookie, it'll simply drop the cookie for other toys to pick up. When a cookie has been carried all the way to the chest, you can't get it back, and when all of the cookies have been taken it's game over.

How are you, gentlemen? All your cookie are belong to us.

When you destroy one of Skarl's toys with your towers, you'll usually get one "part" to build with. Parts are the currency of the game, used to spend on building and upgrading your defences.

The "Cancel Action" option will remove your selection to build a tower or anything else. The only use you have for your keyboard is to pause, using your space bar. Everything else you just click on with your mouse, there aren't any hot keys.

Modes and Points

There are four modes of difficulty in Biscuit Brigade; each one differs in the number of parts you start with, how durable the toys are, how many cookies you have to defend and how many points you receive in total.

• Practice Mode: At the beginning of this mode, you get 100 parts. It's the easiest mode. However, it's made for first-time players and it gives no points.
• Easy Mode: You get 30 parts at the start and the toys in it are of the same difficulty as in Practice Mode. You don't get many points for beating all of the twenty waves, half that you can in Normal Mode, but it's good for tower experimentation while getting yourself some points anyway.
• Normal Mode: This is the middle ground of everything. You start with only 6 cookies and 24 parts, and the toys are tough to stop; the points are decent.
• Hard Mode: This one is very difficult. You only start with 18 parts and have 5 cookies to defend, but you get double the points than on Normal Mode. You don't even get any time to start building at the beginning; Skarl sends his first wave immediately, so you'll be busy from the first second.

Scoring

If you win the game, your final score is the sum of three components:

• Base score: Defeating a toy earns you a specific number of points depending on the type of toy. On Hard mode, defeating all toys and winning the game will net you a base score of 5028 points.
• Part Bonus: This bonus is calculated based on the number of parts you did not spend. The exact formula to calculate this number is currently unknown.
• Cookie Bonus: After winning the game, 200 points are awarded for each cookie remaining, for a possible total of 1000 points. Note that any cookie that does not reach King Skarl counts for this bonus; if a toy moves a cookie from the plate, but is destroyed before making it to King Skarl, the dropped cookie still counts for Cookie Bonus.

Part Bonus

Although the exact formula for Part Bonus is unknown, the following table containing common gold trophy scores can be used to calculate Part Bonus based on the number of parts used after winning the game:

Towers, Blocks and Decoys

You have three tools you can utilize to thwart Skarl's progress: towers, blocks, and decoys.

Towers

At first glance, towers come in only one form. However, towers can be upgraded into a multitude of different defensive and offensive towers, each with a unique ability. To upgrade a tower, just click on it once it's been built and click on the picture of the upgrade you want; you can also instantly deconstruct towers by clicking on the rubble button next to the upgrade options. To increase a tower's range, click on the faded tower image; it'll cost one part up to two times for each tower. The following chart shows which upgrades stem from other upgrades, how much they cost, and their names.

• Initial: The first tower does absolutely nothing but provide a slight barrier to the toys.
• Ball Launcher: The Ball Launcher is a basic tower that attacks one enemy at a time with a low-powered snowball. When upgraded, it stems off into towers that can all do various kinds of damage to the toys.
  • Sling Shot: One of the most basic kinds of towers, the Sling Shot attacks one toy at a quick rate.
    • Potion Slinger: With a small range, the Potion Slinger fires some nasty-looking poison at toys to steadily damage them over time. The constant damage is low, however, and fairly useless if the toys are already getting bombarded by other towers.
    • Crossbow: A simple upgrade to the Sling Shot, its increased power and incredible range make it a great choice to build.
  • Cannon: This tower does less damage than the Sling Shot, but it slowly fires shots that hit multiple enemies at once.
    • Gravel Cannon: An upgrade to the Cannon with only a power boost and the ability of its attack spreading out. It's an excellent tower to build.
    • Rocket Launcher: Despite how incredible it sounds, this tower isn't as good as some others. Its wide range lets it fire rockets to groups of far-away toys for high damage, but it's not guaranteed to hit them and fires slowly.
• Bag Thrower: The Bag Thrower steadily fires bags at toys to permanently slow them up a bit, with a bit of extra damage, but upgrades into towers that have all sorts of different (mostly non-damaging) attacks.
  • Sludge Thrower: A basic upgrade of the Bag Thrower with improvements in range and the amount it slows down toys.
    • Net Thrower: Still the same as the Bag Thrower except for regular power and range boosts, although it only strikes one toy at a time.
    • Windmill: The Windmill actually pushes back any toys in its range with a rapid-fire flurries of snow, rather than giving any permanent effects.
  • Oil Thrower: The Oil Thrower almost completely stops the toys it hits from advancing any further, though only for a few seconds. It launches oil, so it effects groups of toys, but only toys that actually walk over the oil will be effected.
    • Paint Thrower: The Paint Thrower blinds and damages one toy per shot. Once blinded, a toy will move only in its current direction (rather than manoeuvring toward the cookies) and inflict damage to any toy, block, tower or castle wall in front of it. This means that while paint can cause a toy to destroy your towers, it can also be used to your advantage to increase the damage dealt to other toys.
    • Water Thrower: The only tower of its kind, the Water Thrower slightly weakens the durability, speed and block-wrecking power of the toys it hits permanently. It only hits one at a time, unfortunately.

I'll get all your cookies no matter how hard you try! Just go easy on the cannonballs, seriously.

Blocks

Blocks are walls that simply block the toys' path. Each costs one part. You might think that they could be great to make a maze and pick off the toys one by one while they're tramping through it, but toys can slowly tear through them if they're too much in the way. Plus, if they destroy one block, another can't be rebuilt on its square, and its square is completely useless after that. Better to spend your parts on towers.

Decoys

Decoys are plates of fake cookies that you can use to distract the toys; though not guaranteed to even get their attention, they cost two parts each and can be pretty useful on big, tough waves. Toys will treat the decoys as the real cookies and tramp over to them, take one, and head back over to Skarl's chest.

Strategy

What can make Biscuit Brigade so much fun is all the different towers possibilities and combinations; however, some combinations are proven to work almost every time you use them. Here is an example of one such strategy.

The overall strategy is to slow down and weaken the waves of toys and strike them all together. This strategy was developed for Normal Mode.

First, build one of the top Gravel Cannons and a Sling Shot lower down. When you get the parts to build another tower, create the Water Thrower at the top of the layout, then turn your Sling Shot into a Crossbow. All the next few parts you get should be spent in building and upgrading two more Crossbows and another Gravel Cannon near the back. After that, build the Oil Thrower and Sludge Thrower in the middle; next, the other Water Thrower. Finally, use the rest of your parts to build the rest of the shown towers and upgrade them as you need them at the time.

Note that two cookies were lost. This strategy has much room for improvement, but it serves as an introduction to the different tower types, and this experience can be used to design a better strategy suited for Hard Mode.

Game Codes

There are a few codes that can be typed in at any point during the game to earn you a few bonuses!

• recon - reveals the attack path. (thanks to tama970406)
• removedebris - gets rid of debris on the field. Once per game.
• retreat - reveals the return path. Unlimited use.

I'll be back!

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