How a match works

A match lasts roughly five to ten minutes: twelve waves of enemies, then a boss showdown that ends only when one team's base falls. Two teams always play the same match at the same time, on the same map, against the same waves. You cannot see the other team's board, only their base health and player count, which is exactly enough to be nervous.

Joining

Joining is one tap in the panel and stays open for the whole match while the team is under sixty players. Your unit walks in under your Twitch name and takes a spot in a tower with room; moving to another tower is always your call. Join late and the game hands you the safe stat option from every upgrade round you missed, instantly, so you arrive useful. The catch-up picks are deliberately never Empower, so arriving late is never the clever play.

If fewer than eight units are fielded when wave one starts, computer-controlled allies fill the team up to eight, so a quiet lobby still fights a full-feeling match.

Waves, and the race inside them

Enemies spawn at the mouth of the path and walk toward your base. Each wave is one batch on a forty-second timer, but a wave usually dies early, and the moment either team clears, both teams advance. A faster rival literally drags the next wave onto your board while you are still mopping up the last one, and the leftovers stay to make it worse. Speed on their side is pressure on yours.

Towers and positioning

The map has twelve towers and each holds up to six units. Units aim and fire on their own; your decisions are where to stand, when to move, and what to cast. Towers near the path's end see the most traffic but least margin for error; towers up front start the whittling early. Moving into a full tower is rejected, so coordinate.

The Upgrade Draft

There is no gold and no shop. After each odd-numbered wave (one, three, five, seven, nine, eleven) every player unlocks a draft round: four options, pick one, at your own pace from the panel. Your weapon is not one of them. Each kit fights with its own weapon for the whole match, and the draft is entirely about what you bolt onto it.

Option one is always a safe stat option: a blend of raw damage, attack speed, and sometimes crit chance or your class mastery. It is reliable, immediate, and never wrong, and the blend on offer varies round to round.
Options two and three are cards dealt from a pool of 105 upgrades. Some cards open a direction (a creature that fights for you, a poison, a way to hit more of the wave) and others only deepen a direction you already have. Your first round deals two openers from two different directions, since you have committed to nothing yet. After that, one card leans into a direction you have invested in and the other deliberately offers you something else, so a run is never a single corridor. A card that amplifies something you do not own is simply never dealt to you.
Option four is Empower. You take nothing now, and every card you are offered from then on prints a bigger number. Empower early and often and you become the late-game monster; the trade is real weakness while the debt matures. Empower is absent from the final round, since there is nothing left for it to pay for.

The cards you are offered depend on the kit you are playing and on what you have already taken, so two Rangers in the same tower rarely see the same panel. A card you have already been shown and passed over is not dealt to you again while there is anything fresh left in the pool.

Mana and spells

Every player has a mana bar that fills from wave income, capped at one hundred. Your kit's spells sit on your action bar: they are the part of the game you aim yourself, and a well-timed freeze or volley is worth more than a minute of auto-fire. A handful of upgrade cards add a whole extra spell to your bar; those cost no mana and hold two charges, so you can bank one for the moment that matters. If your mana overflows the cap, the game autocasts for you rather than waste it; the craft is spending it better than the autopilot would.

Siege: the namesake

Siege is a separate ability on every action bar, and it is how you attack the other stream directly. Each press spends ten mana into a team pool. At the end of each wave, if the pool holds at least five mana per teammate, it triggers: the rival's next wave arrives empowered by three percent for every point of that per-teammate average, and the entire pool is consumed. Below the threshold, the pool banks. Every point of Siege is a point not spent defending your own lane, which is precisely the tension. The Siege window closes going into the final wave, when all mana turns to defense.

Leaks and base health

An enemy that reaches your base leaks, dealing its damage to your base health. The health pool is generous, roughly two and a half full waves of leaks, because the waves are not meant to kill you. What kills you is arriving at the boss race weak, greedy, or already bleeding.

The boss showdown

After wave twelve, each team faces its own boss on its own board, and the two fights feed each other. Kill your boss and it is reborn about twenty percent stronger on the rival's lane; let it leak through and it crosses over unescalated instead. There are never more than two bosses in play between the two teams, so the showdown is a rally: the same threats pass back and forth, growing, until one base falls. That team loses. There is no timer and no mercy rule.

Contribution and the bow

All progress is shared: there is no kill-stealing and no personal gold. What is personal is credit. A live contribution ranking runs all match, and the final board hands out awards: top contribution, top boss damage, most crowd control, most damage enabled for allies, and more. Supports get counted, not just carries: enabling a teammate's damage pays into your line too.

When no rival stream is matched, your team races a tuned training opponent that clears waves, fights the boss duel, and climbs or drops a difficulty level match to match. The on-stream scoreboard always shows which one you are up against.