Blooket has two tower defense modes, and a lot of strategy advice online mixes them up. The original Tower Defense (TD1) rewards a cheap, stun-heavy setup built around Wind Dragons and Mini Jesters. Tower Defense 2 (TD2) is a different game: 18 towers, four difficulties, ghost enemies that most towers cannot touch, and a much harsher refund when you sell. This guide separates the two, then walks through TD2 wave by wave, with every tower number taken from Blooket's own help center and the community-run Blooket Wiki.
The short version
- Playing TD2 on Normal or harder? Build a Toucan economy early, then have ghost-capable towers (Owl, Alien, Chick, Peacock, Bird Nest or Penguin) in place before wave 12.
- Playing the original Tower Defense? Pair Wind Dragons with Mini Jesters near the start of the track and let Crazy Unicorns and Agent Owls do the damage.
- In a Live game hosted by your teacher? The leaderboard counts damage, not waves survived, so economy only helps if it turns into damage before the timer runs out.
Tower Defense vs. Tower Defense 2: Which Mode Are You Playing?
The two modes share a name and three of their maps, but almost every number that matters is different. If a guide tells you to "sell and rebuild," check which mode it means first: in TD1 a sale returns 80% of what you spent, in TD2 only half. The table compares the modes using Blooket's official overviews for Tower Defense and Tower Defense 2, plus the Blooket Wiki's pages for each mode.
| Feature | Tower Defense (TD1) | Tower Defense 2 (TD2) |
|---|---|---|
| Released | February 9, 2021 | February 12, 2023 |
| Maps | 3 | 5 (two of them with two paths) |
| Difficulty | Fixed | Easy, Normal, Hard, Nightmare |
| Towers | 12 | 18 |
| Upgrades | 3 tiers, 2 choices per tier | 4 upgrades in a single line |
| Tower prices | 2 to 12 tokens | 30 to 100 tokens |
| Sell refund | 80% of total spent | 50% of total spent |
| Ghost enemies | None | From round 12 on Normal and up |
| Support towers | Jester | King, Queen, Toucan |
| Random events in Live games | Yes | No |
| Ideal game length | 8+ minutes | 10+ minutes |
The rest of this guide covers TD2 first, because it is the deeper mode and the one most players get stuck in, then returns to the classic TD1 setup. If tower defense in general is new to you, our beginner's guide to tower defense explains paths, range and upgrades from scratch.
Waiting for your teacher to start the next Blooket game? Practice tower placement on free tower defense games that run right in your browser, with no download and no login.
Play Tower Defense UnblockedTower Defense 2 Strategy, Wave by Wave
TD2's difficulty does not rise smoothly. It arrives in a few distinct walls, and runs end when a defense is built for the wrong one. The phases below assume Solo on Normal or Hard, where you start with 100 Health, every leaked enemy takes some of it away, and the game saves after each round so you can come back later.
Before wave 1
Pick the Map and Difficulty
TD2 has five maps. Sunny Meadow, Lost Desert and Abandoned Mine are rated easy, Crossroads is medium and Fractured Factory is hard. The two harder maps are harder for a specific reason: each has two paths, and the active path changes every turn, so a defense parked on one lane sits idle half the time. Put your first towers where their range reaches both paths, or near the point where the two paths meet.
Difficulty matters even more than the map. According to the Blooket Wiki, Easy gives you every tower from the start, has no ghost enemies, and ends at wave 30 unless you choose to keep going, which makes it the best place to learn each tower's range. Normal adds Ghost Blooks from round 12. Hard makes enemies stronger and spawns them more often. Nightmare changes the rules entirely and gets its own section below.
Waves 1 to 11
Build the Economy While Enemies Are Weak
The opening waves bring the weakest Evil Blooks, and a leak is cheap: a Light Blue costs you 1 Health, a Pink 2 and a Purple 3. That makes this the cheapest moment of the whole run to invest in income instead of firepower.
The income tower is the Toucan, which pays bonus tokens after every wave: 2 at level 1, rising to 4, 7, 13 and finally 25 at max level. Its five levels cost 30, 20, 30, 50 and 100 tokens, 230 in total. Those numbers explain a piece of community advice on the wiki, which is to max one Toucan before buying a second: each upgrade returns 10 to 12% of its price every wave, while a brand-new Toucan returns under 7%. They also explain why the timing matters. A maxed Toucan needs about nine waves of income to repay its 230 tokens, so one started at wave 3 earns for the whole run, while one started at wave 40 may never break even.
For damage, spend your first tokens on towers that stay useful later. The 30-token Chick is cheap, throws at up to three enemies at once and can hit ghosts, so it will not become dead weight at wave 12. Add an Owl early as well. At 50 tokens it has a range of 6, the longest in TD2, so one well-placed Owl covers a large share of most maps.
Wave 12
Pass the Ghost Check
On Normal and harder, Ghost Blooks begin appearing at round 12, and they can collapse a defense that looked solid one wave earlier. Blooket's help center warns that ghosts "can only be damaged by certain towers," and the wiki's tower table names them: Chick, Penguin, Owl, Peacock, Bird Nest and Alien. Every other tower, including heavy hitters like the Pig, Dragon and Unicorn, ignores a ghost as it floats past.
There is one workaround. A fully upgraded Queen grants ghost detection to towers in its range, on top of boosting their range by 17.5% and cutting their prices by 20%. That makes a max Queen the glue of a late-game defense, because it lets your best splash towers join the fight. One warning: some guides list the Goldfish as a ghost counter, but the wiki's own tower table marks it as unable to damage ghosts, so give it a Queen before you rely on it.
Waves 20 to 30
Bring Splash Damage for the Swarm
By the twenties the problem flips from a few tough enemies to sheer numbers. On Hard, the wiki singles out rounds 21 to 24 as arguably the hardest stretch of the mode, when dozens of Rainbow Blooks crowd the path, and each Rainbow that leaks costs 20 Health. The wiki's advice for this stretch is a good mix of splash and single-target damage. Multi-target towers earn their place here: the Pig (40 damage per explosion at max level), the Dragon and the Unicorn all hit every enemy caught in their blast. Place them beside long straight stretches, where a crowd stays inside their range the longest.
Penguins are the other half of the answer. A max-level Penguin slows every enemy near it by 40%, which buys your splash towers extra volleys, but its range is only 1.5, so put it exactly where the swarm bunches up. As a benchmark for how much the top towers carry, the wiki notes that on Easy and Normal maps it is possible to survive to wave 30 with just a max-level Owl and a max-level Unicorn.
Wave 50 and beyond
Climb the Health Wall
From wave 50, enemy health climbs exponentially until wave 80, after which it grows more slowly. By then you are short on both space and tokens, and the priorities change:
- Sell Toucans to free up space. They never attack, and the board only has so many open spots. A sale refunds 50% of what you spent, which hurts, but losing the run hurts more.
- Put Kings beside your damage dealers. A max King cuts the reload time of nearby towers by 15%. Support buffs do not cross over, though: a King will not speed up a Toucan's income or strengthen a Penguin's slow.
- Retarget your snipers. Most towers can be set to attack the First, Last, Strongest, Weakest, Farthest or Closest enemy. Setting Owls to Strongest sends their 120-damage shots into the heaviest Blooks.
- Respect the heavy enemies. Oak, Stone and Metal Blooks cost 25 Health each if they leak, and a single Obsidian Blook costs 50, half of everything you started with.
Every Tower Defense 2 Tower, Compared
The table lists all 18 TD2 towers with their base price and max-level stats from the Blooket Wiki's tower table. "Hits all" means the attack damages every enemy inside its area. The last three rows are support towers, which buff other towers instead of attacking.
| Tower | Cost | Role | Hits ghosts | At max level |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Owl | 50 | Long-range sniper | Yes | 120 damage, 2s reload, range 6 |
| Alien | 100 | Rapid-fire lasers | Yes | 8 damage, 0.3s reload, 7 targets |
| Unicorn | 70 | Homing missiles, splash | No | 40 damage, 2s reload, hits all, range 5 |
| Pig | 50 | Exploding shots, splash | No | 40 damage, 1.8s reload, hits all |
| Dragon | 50 | Close-range fire | No | 22 damage, 1.3s reload, hits all, range 2 |
| Wizard | 70 | Tornado that pushes enemies back | No | 30 damage, 4s reload, 10 targets |
| Goldfish | 50 | Fish that swim the path backwards | No | 20 damage, 2.8s reload, 7 targets |
| Moose | 50 | Syrup bottles, splash | No | 12 damage, 2.5s reload, hits all, range 4 |
| Mega Bot | 100 | Boomerangs | No | 8 damage, 3 projectiles, 1.6s reload |
| Peacock | 50 | Returning feathers | Yes | 6 damage, 0.8s reload, 10 targets |
| Bird Nest | 50 | Spawns attacking birds | Yes | 6 damage, 3 birds, 4 targets |
| Chick | 30 | Cheap multi-target | Yes | 6 damage, 0.4s reload, 5 targets |
| Gorilla | 30 | Bananas in all directions | No | 4 damage, 12 projectiles, range 1.5 |
| Squirrel | 30 | Acorn volleys | No | 3 damage, 5 projectiles, 0.9s reload |
| Penguin | 50 | Slows nearby enemies | Yes | 40% slow, range 1.5 |
| King | 50 | Support: faster reloads | No | 15% shorter reload for nearby towers |
| Queen | 30 | Support: range, discounts, ghost detection | Grants it | 17.5% more range, 20% lower prices nearby |
| Toucan | 30 | Support: income | No | 25 bonus tokens per wave |
If you remember only four towers, make them the Owl for range and single-target damage, the Alien for ghost waves, the Pig or Unicorn for crowds, and the Toucan for income. Everything else fills gaps around those four.
Nightmare Difficulty: Winning With Random Towers
Nightmare removes the shop. You start with only the three support towers, the Toucan, Queen and King, and every 5 to 10 waves you choose one of three randomly offered towers. Because you cannot buy damage when you need it, the usual order flips:
- Open with a Toucan. There is nothing else worth spending on before your first pick, so bank income while you can.
- Take ghost-capable damage when it is offered. The wiki calls the Alien one of the top Nightmare picks, and at max level it fires every 0.3 seconds and hits ghosts.
- Max a Queen early. Ghost detection from the Queen means any random tower you are offered can still fight ghosts.
- Treat the Goldfish as Queen-dependent. The wiki also rates it highly for Nightmare, but its tower table says it cannot damage ghosts on its own.
The Best Blooket Tower Defense (TD1) Setup: The Perma-Stun
The original Tower Defense plays very differently. Towers are cheap, from 2 tokens for a Laser Chick to 12 for The King, and each has three upgrade tiers with two choices per tier. The final tier changes the tower's look and adds a special ability. Because a sale refunds 80% of everything you spent, moving towers around is cheap, so treat early placements as drafts.
The best-known TD1 build is what the Blooket Wiki's Tower Defense page calls the Perma Stun. Wind Dragons, whose final upgrade knocks enemies back with every hit, are sped up by Mini Jesters until the knockback keeps Evil Blooks pinned in place, while Crazy Unicorns and Agent Owls do the damage. Twinfinite's TD1 setup guide uses the same pieces: Wind Dragons and a few Party Pigs near the start of the track, Crazy Unicorns and Agent Owls to pick off the stalled enemies, and Mini Jesters spaced apart because their buffs do not overlap. Twinfinite says the build can carry a run past round 300.
These are the upgrade paths the wiki recommends for each piece:
- Dragon: Attack Speed, Attack Speed, then Wind Dragon
- Jester: Firing Rate, Range, then Mini Jester
- Pig: Blast Radius, Range, then Party Pig, which makes every enemy it hits dance in place for a second
- Unicorn: Attack Speed, Blast Radius, then Crazy Unicorn
- Owl: Speed, Speed, then Agent Owl
Unicorns and Owls handle the damage because their final upgrades hit for a share of an enemy's current health: 15% per Crazy Unicorn missile, capped at 50 damage, and 25% per Agent Owl shot, capped at 150. The caps are why the stun half of the build matters. The wiki works out that a 5,000-health slime boss takes 100 Crazy Unicorn hits or 34 Agent Owl shots, so those bosses have to be held in place long enough to absorb that many.
Two other TD1 habits pay off. First, answer accurately rather than quickly: the wiki notes that TD1 gives extra tokens when all three between-wave questions are correct, and answer speed does not matter. Second, in Live games, sell towers you received from random events once they have done their job, which is advice straight from Blooket's Tower Defense overview.
If TD1's enemies feel familiar, there is a reason. Each Evil Blook splits into the next weaker one when popped, and the Blooket Wiki describes the mode as based on Ninja Kiwi's Bloons Tower Defense. Our short history of Bloons Tower Defense covers where that layered-enemy idea started, and fans of the newest entry can find more like it in our list of games like Bloons TD 6.
Want to see where Blooket's layered enemies came from? Bloons Tower Defense 4, the Flash-era classic, still runs free in your browser.
Play Bloons Tower Defense 4Live Games vs. Solo: Different Goals, Different Builds
Blooket's help center describes two different win conditions, and they call for different builds. In Solo, you protect your Health for as many waves as possible, and your progress saves after every round, so long-term investments like Toucans and a maxed Queen keep paying off across sessions.
In a Live game hosted by a teacher, players compete to deal the most damage before time runs out or before someone reaches the host's goal. Blooket lists the ideal game length as 8+ minutes for Tower Defense and 10+ for Tower Defense 2, so a Live game may only run for a limited number of waves. A maxed Toucan that needs about nine waves to break even may never pay off in that window, while a damage tower placed early adds to your score every wave. In short Live games, favor damage over economy and keep answering, because every correct answer is more tokens.
Five Mistakes That End Blooket Tower Defense Runs
- No ghost coverage at wave 12. A TD2 defense of Pigs, Dragons and Unicorns looks unbeatable until the first ghost walks straight through it.
- Selling in TD2 the way you would in TD1. Rebuilding costs you half of everything invested in TD2, against 20% in TD1, so plan placements before you buy.
- Defending only one lane on two-path maps. On Crossroads and Fractured Factory, the active path switches every turn.
- Buying a second Toucan before maxing the first. Upgrades return a bigger share of their cost every wave than a fresh Toucan does.
- Rushing answers in TD1. Speed earns nothing extra, but getting all three questions right does.
The same placement instincts carry over to every tower defense game. If you want more of the genre outside class, our roundup of the best Roblox tower defense games is a natural next step, and our full library has dozens of free tower defense games you can play in a browser.