A Bloons TD 3 Game Plan: From Round 1 on Easy to Hard Mode

Bloons Tower Defense 3 has eight tracks, and the way you open a game depends on which one you pick more than on anything else. This is a round-by-round plan for the first few rounds, how Easy and Hard change it, and what to do on the day a round is about to leak.

Before round 1

After the intro and the track screen, the game asks for Easy, Med or Hard. On Easy you get 100 lives and the cheapest towers; on Hard, 50 lives and every price higher — a Dart Monkey goes from 215 to 270. Both start with 650 money. On Easy the game opens with a short note reminding you that stuff is cheap and you have 100 lives.

Do not press Start Round with money in the bank. Look at the track first and find the places where the path turns back on itself. A tower on the inside of a hairpin sees the same bloons twice, once on the way in and once on the way out. On the sandy lawn track, the first bends at the top left and the long loop in the middle are the obvious spots.

Placing towers

Click a tower in Buy Stuff and move the mouse over the map. A circle follows it: that is the tower's range. If the circle is red, the spot is not allowed — you are on the path or too close to it. Move onto open grass until it clears and click. Esc (or the Cancel Buy button) puts the tower back. Placement on a trackpad works the same way; move slowly, then click.

Rounds 1 to 5

The first round is a line of red bloons, and a single Dart Monkey on a good corner handles it. Spend the rest of the starting money on a second Dart Monkey further along the track, so anything that slips past the first gets a second chance. After each round, spend what you earned: piercing darts first, because they let one dart pop more than one bloon.

Rounds 5 to 15

Tougher bloons carry weaker ones inside, so one leak costs more than one life. This is where a Tack Shooter pays off — put it where two stretches of track run side by side so its eight tacks cover both. Then build the pair the game is designed around: an Ice Ball to stop the crowd and a Cannon beside it to pop it. Remember that frozen bloons are immune to anything sharp; keep the Ice Ball away from your darts and tacks.

When a round is about to leak

This is what Road Spikes, Monkey Glue and the Pineapple are for. They cost 25, 30 and 20 on Easy and last only until the round ends. Drop spikes near the exit to catch the last 10 bloons, glue in front of your strongest tower so 20 bloons crawl through its range, or a Pineapple just ahead of a dense group — it explodes shortly after it lands. Cheap insurance beats losing ten lives.

Moving up to Hard

Hard halves your lives and makes everything dearer, so the Easy opening does not fit anymore. Open with one Dart Monkey and keep the change, upgrade before you expand, and rely more on the one-round items. A Monkey Beacon, which boosts the range of every tower around it, is worth more on Hard than on Easy because you will have fewer towers to cover the track.

Which track to learn first

Start on the long, winding lawn track: plenty of hairpins and plenty of grass. The compact circuit board and the snowy pipe track have less room between paths, which makes placement harder. Once a plan works on one track, try it on the next — the towers do not change, only the corners do.