Me and my sister, occasionally my brother, used to play WII multiplayer religiously. Except we never fought each other.

We’d set up as enemies, enable walls, and then each pick our favourite peon and peasant. We’d stick them together (being the only class that doesn’t actively start attacking each other when together), build a wall around them, and name them (almost always Tom and Bob, or Tom and Joe). Then we’d build elaborate mazes and circuses around that box, usually with a gladiator ring to occasionally send enemies into to fight. Anything was game, the only rules being Never Kill Tom and Bob. The box around them, of course, was to stop enemy troops from auto-attacking when they got near.

We’d pretty much just cover the entire map in wall-mazes and designs. Sometimes cut mazes into trees.

While mucking about on different game types on GTA:Online, my friends and I tweaked one and transformed a fairly run-of-the-mill tower defence into a harrowing experience.

The basic game mode, Siege Mentality, involves a lone player, with a full armoury at their disposal, defending a location for a few minutes against a whole team of opposing players armed with short-range weapons.

One map is an isolated, large farmhouse out in the sticks (familiar to those who have played the single player campaign). And it’s fine and fun and there are lots of nice vantage points in the form of first floor balconies.

But what if you change the time/weather settings pre-game to make it a dark and stormy night? What if the defender is limited to a pistol, and the attackers can only use knives? What if everyone is in restricted to first-person view?

Suddenly, there you are, cowering in a first-floor bathroom, listening to the faint sounds of footsteps creeping up the stairs, pistol trained on the door…only to see another masked murderer’s silhouette pass by the window, having shimmied up onto the roof. The tight, blind corners inside the house, the multiple entry points, the fact that the house is just naturally REALLY creepy… In the dozen or so games we’ve played, only one defender has survived until dawn.

When I was a kid, I was in love with the Amiga game Defender of the Crown. I knew the game well enough to beat it every time, so I made it more interesting by giving myself a new challenge: I would pick an opposing Saxon lord at the beginning of the game, and make *him* win. In my head, my character had the combined humility and cunning to understand that even though he could take the throne, Cedric of Rotherwood - whose leadership rating is ‘strong’ - was the king England really needed. Rather than being the king, my character would be the kingmaker.

This proved to be quite a bit trickier than winning the usual way. The Saxon lords (as opposed to the tougher Normans down south) are wet blankets militarily, and an enormous amount of handholding is required for them to build up their forces. Generally, I’d conquer all the territory around my beloved Cedric (basically forming a protective wall around him), and let him slowly expand into my territory as I fought off all of the other lords. I’d regularly challenge him to jousts, bet whole territories on the outcome, and flail around so ineptly that the assembled lords and ladies would certainly have muttered about match-fixing.

The really tricky part came in the endgame. To pull it off, I needed to (a) stop Cedric from taking my home castle too soon, (b) defeat all the Norman lords, and © in the process, have them destroy *nearly* my entire army, leaving me vulnerable to Cedric’s slow bumbling advances. Because you gain troops automatically based on which territories you control at the start of each turn, the second half of the game becomes about maintaining a delicate reciprocal balance between taking territories down south and losing them up north. After I’d taken care of all of the future-king’s enemies for him, mortally wounded my own forces in the process, and essentially handed him England on a silver platter, that ungrateful little shit Cedric would finally attack my home castle, seize the throne, and erase all historical traces of what I had done.

“For England,” I’d whisper, as my home castle burned to the ground in the distance.