The problem with writing about flash-based tower defence games is that they’re very… hang on a minute.

I have to go and beat my top score on Cursed Treasure: those peasants won’t shoot arrows into themselves, you know. Oh great, I can upgrade my Fire Temple now… aha! Fry, scabby jewel thieves!

Oops. Sorry about that. Got a bit distracted.

One of the reasons tower defence games are more addictive than heroin flavoured Pringles is that they follow a deceptively simple formula:

a) You’re given an initial cash float and use this to buy gun turrets, which automatically fire on anything that comes near the goal you’ve sworn to protect.

b) You use the cash earned from kicking bad-guy bottom to upgrade your defences.

As time goes on, the baddies get tougher (and smarter), but if you play your cards right and think strategically you’ll probably be one step ahead. And by ‘one step ahead’ I mean ‘up all night’. Yes, these games really are very moreish.

You have been warned.

5. Bubble Tanks Tower Defense

In fifth place we have this user-friendly introduction to the tower defence genre. After a thorough tutorial you’re presented with a herd of bubble-based miscreants to exterminate using turrets that can be merged together to form massive super-towers. Beware the see-through baddies who can pass through your carefully-placed defences more easily than a vindaloo through a drunk bloke, leaving you shaking your fist and wishing you’d remembered to upgrade your ‘ghost splash’ tower.

4. Desktop Tower Defense

Desktop Tower Defense is another great entry-level game. This time, the map resembles an office desktop (although without the crumbs and Tears of Despair that litter mine). As in Bubble Tanks, blob-shaped baddies (‘creeps’) start at one side of the screen and try to get to the other. They don’t follow a preset path, which means you can use your towers to divert them in entertaining and strategically useful directions before delivering the knockout blow: “Aha! Take that, random assailant!”

3. Bloons 4

Balloons are a menace, frankly. Getting all up in people’s faces with their bright, jolly colours. Who do they think they are, eh?

Yes, if you’re a globophobe then Bloons 4 is the game for you. It’s a bright, addictive and appealing piece of whimsy, with weapons that include monkeys, fans, planes, pineapples, cannons and much, much more. It’s a path-based tower defence game, a variant I have to admit I’m usually less fond of as it tends to make things a bit more predictable and limits creativity, but this game’s so polished and witty you simply can’t fault it. The fast forward button that whizzes the balloons towards your boomerang-hurling monkeys is a particularly handy touch.

2. Cursed Treasure

Second place goes to Cursed Treasure, the best of a whole sub-genre of medieval ‘Prithee, Do Not Destroye My Castle, Goode Sir Knighte’ type tower defence games. You’re an evil overlord trying to stop goody-two-shoes ‘champions’ stealing your bling. At your disposal are basic dens that fire (yawn) arrows, not to mention spooky crypts and firey, demonic temples that shoot frickin’ laser beams. Like Bloons, Cursed Treasure is a path-based tower defence game, but it introduces a new feature to make the gameplay less linear: different kinds of terrain that you have to level by chopping down trees before you can build your towers (thus proving you really are evil, you tree-hating non-hippy).

1. Warzone Tower Defense

I’m about as logical and strategic as a rotting kebab on a park bench (and much less covered in seagulls) but nevertheless this game had me up all night due to its hellishly addictive learning curve. “Damn, if only I’d put my laser cannon there and upgraded it to level four. I’ll try again.”

Set in a futuristic warzone, this game takes the maze-creation elements of Bubble Tanks and Desktop Tower Defense to a whole new level, thanks in part to a larger playing field and the addition of small stone barricades that you can place to block off the attackers. This makes all the difference as it suddenly becomes much easier to create complex labyrinths that force the invaders back on themselves.

“You want to go over there, little tank thing? Well you can’t! Not until you’ve navigated my Meandering Maelstrom of Fiery Doom!! Mwa ha ha ha.”

Ooh, that reminds me, I’ve got a new pulse-emitter tactic I’d like to try…

(Three hours later)

Er, what was I saying again? Who are you? Are you a tower? Do you need defending?

I WILL DEFEND YOU OH MIGHTY TOWER.

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You've all played tower defence games before, so you know how Fratboy Girlfriend TD works – some enemies try to invade your castle and flank the route with weapons to stop them.

But no tower defence games have been quite so casually misogynistic as Fratboy Girlfriend TD. That's because you play a man so fraught with jealousy that his slutty girlfriend might cop off with some fratboys that he chooses to destroy them all with arrows and bombs and whatnot. So basically Fratboy Girlfriend TD is a form of domestic violence, but a fun one.

Play Fratboy Girlfriend TD now