A run carries two separate health bars. Combat HP is what your tower fights with, and it resets every battle, so damage taken in a fight never bleeds into the run. Your life points are the ones that decide survival: they persist, and running them out ends the run.
Winning and losing
- Win a fight and you earn a trophy and lose nothing.
- Lose a fight and you take no trophy and pay life points. The cost climbs as the run goes: 1 life across the first couple of days, 2 through the next couple, then a steady 3 for the rest of the run. Early stumbles are cheap, late ones bite.
- There are no streak bonuses, so a clean win counts the same whether it is your first or your fifth.
Ranked and Endless
- Ranked ends in victory at 10 trophies and in defeat at 0 life points. A ranked run rarely lasts past about day 15.
- Endless drops the trophy target and keeps going, capped at day 100, and it stops handing out fresh encounters at some point rather than forever.
- If both towers fall on the exact same frame, the tie goes to you.
Surviving the late game
Because each level scales your max HP off your current HP, a couple of big flat HP gains early snowball into a huge pool by the end. Encounters like the Cleric and the Bishop hand out large HP boosts, and a deep pool is exactly what lets a defensive tower outlast the opponent once Sudden Death sets in.