About

Vortex Pin started as a shared spreadsheet between three friends who kept arguing about which tower defence maps were fair and which ones were just cheap. At some point the spreadsheet got too big, so we turned it into a website. Everything here comes from games we personally installed and finished, or at least pushed far enough to have an honest opinion.

We care most about strategy and tower defence, but we also test RPGs, racers and simulations when they cross our desks, because good design travels between genres. A clever upgrade tree in a racing game can teach you something about pacing a defence loop.

Games get picked in a simple way: someone on the team plays it for a week, keeps a log, and if it holds up we write it up. If it falls apart after the tutorial, we usually just move on rather than pile on. We would rather cover fewer titles well than skim a hundred of them.

Nothing here is sponsored placement. When we like something we say so, and when a mechanic annoys us we say that too, with the specific reason attached.

Markus Feldmann — Markus has been building tower defence layouts since flash games ran in browsers, and now spends most of his commute replaying maps to shave off seconds.