Introducing a Series of Bastion Puzzles

Welcome to the bastion, recruit! Your training starts now.

We’re here in one of the bastion’s six districts. The districts form a ring with the citadel in the center. Every district contains three sources and a tower that can help you collect mana, but we’ll get to that later. More importantly for now, each of these districts has four wall sections, and if you look beyond those walls, you’ll see some enemies. They’re just training dummies for now, of course, but soon enough you’ll be out there fighting the real thing. My job is to make sure you know all you need to survive.

We’ve created a number of lessons to help you learn the techniques for defending the bastion. Beginning with the basics, you’ll slowly learn more and more advanced skills until you’re ready to join the ranks of the city’s defenders. Each drill ends with a test that forces you to put all the skills you’ve learned to use.  

Let’s get started. We’ll begin with three simple actions: Moving, Channeling, and Attacking enemies. You can only take each action once per turn, but you can take them in any order. You don’t have to take an action if you don’t want to, but remember it’s best to get as much as you can out of every turn and that means taking actions.

Moving is simple enough. You just move from your current district into an adjacent district or the citadel. Enemies will come from all sides, so you’ll need to stay on the move if you’re going to deal with them all.

Now let’s talk about channeling. Defeating enemies requires mana, and channeling the sources, towers, and citadel itself are your best way of obtaining it. Placing one of your mana of any color on a source in your district grants you three mana matching the source’s color. That will close it off, and you won’t be able to channel it again.

This is a good way to get mana, but what are you going to do when you’ve closed off the sources you need? You don’t know? Well pay attention. If it’s open, you can always place mana on the tower in your district. Not only does this open all the closed sources in your district, you also get to take all of the mana on those sources. Not a bad way to score mana if you plan it out correctly, is it?

The final way to get mana is by visiting the citadel and channeling it. You don’t need to give up any of your own mana here and you get all of the mana on closed towers. Just remember, each form of channeling has its uses, but you can only channel one of these ways each turn.

So why do you need all this mana? It’s the only way to defeat enemies. In their effort to invade the bastion, enemies will appear at a district’s wall sections. To attack an enemy, you must spend mana equal to the enemy’s strength and the mana must match the enemy’s color. This removes that enemy and gets you one step closer to victory.

And that’s it for this lesson. Your first test is below. The focus here is on the basic actions you can take. Remember that you can move, channel, and attack only once per turn, but you can do them in any order you'd like. You have two turns to attack both enemies. Go.

Think you've got it? Now try your hand at something a bit more difficult. You have three turns. Attack all three enemies. Go. 

Bastion is a thrilling cooperative game of tower defense for one to four players. In anticipation of its release later this fall, we'll be posting a series of puzzles on our website. Check back for the solutions to these puzzles in the next lesson!

You can find the solutions to these puzzles here.