A siege you don't fight — you steer.
Marching Orders is a browser-based puzzle game about commanding a column of alien soldiers as they march, blindly and relentlessly, into a fortified tower. You never take direct control of a single trooper. Instead, you shape the environment around them — planting signs, dropping equipment crates, digging through walls, assigning special jobs to individuals — and watch the consequences ripple through the whole marching mass.
If you've ever played Lemmings, the idea will feel familiar: a stream of simple-minded creatures pours into the level and does exactly one thing (march forward, turn at walls, fall off ledges) until you intervene. Your job is to turn that mindless stampede into a coordinated assault, using a small toolkit and a limited number of troops, before your reinforcements run out or the clock does.
- The diorama. The game world is a chunky, blocky landscape — think voxels, like a stripped-down Minecraft — rendered in 3D. You can orbit the camera around it, pan, and zoom, or snap to a clean isometric view for a more puzzle-board feel.
- The drop pod. This is where your troops enter the level. They spawn at a steady rate and immediately start marching in whatever direction the pod faces.
- The column. Your soldiers walk forward automatically, turn around when they hit something too tall to climb, step over small ledges, and fall (sometimes fatally) off high edges. They'll fight anything hostile they bump into. Left alone, this behavior alone often isn't enough to win.
- Crates. Equipment left on the ground that the first troops to walk over
- Signs. Small planted markers that redirect the flow of the column. An arrow sign sends every troop that steps on it the way it points; a fan sign spreads the column over three lanes (and funnels it back onto one lane when approached from the other side); a forward sign straightens out troops that cross it sideways; a blocker turns them back. Every sign is a single rotatable placement (Q, the mouse wheel or the rotate button), and while you aim it a ghost of the sign with a ground arrow — or a funnel, for the fan — shows exactly which way the troops will go. This is your main lever for "programming" the crowd's path without controlling anyone individually.
- Enemy columns. Levels can also field enemy drop pods whose troops march just like yours — following their own signs and crates — and fight your column wherever the two meet. it will automatically pick up — rifles, pickaxes, ladders. Equipping troops this way permanently changes what they can do (dig through walls, climb vertical faces, fight at range). A bridge kit lays planks over trenches and pits instead of dropping in. Support kits round the toolbox out: a medic kit heals wounded comrades in range automatically, grenades are lobbed at anything hostile in a band ahead, armor soaks up half of every hit until it is spent, and a parachute turns a fatal drop into a soft landing. Most kits take a troop's single equipment slot, but armor and parachutes stack on top of whatever it already carries — and every number behind them (charges, ranges, mitigation, which kits stack) is a per-level rule.
- Roles. A handful of troops can be pulled aside and given a special job — such as becoming a builder who constructs stairways, changing how the whole
- Guards. The tower isn't empty. Sentries, turrets, and grenadiers defend it, and your column will need to fight, avoid, or route around them.
- The objective. Most levels simply ask you to get a certain number of troops to a marked room. Win, and the siege is over. Run out of troops first, and it isn't.
There's also a built-in level designer — a mode where you can build your
own towers, place guards, enemy pods, signs and crates for either side (a
Player / Enemy team selector works like a paint), tune the difficulty, and
share the result as a link others can open and play immediately, with no
installation or file-sharing required.
The designer also hosts a parametric level builder: pick a seed, a
difficulty (0–10), how many obstacle segments the approach should have and
how wide the corridor is — and, if you like, how many troops you get, how
many enemy pods cross the yard and how big their columns are, how many
guards hold the keep and how many rifle crates the enemy finds (anything
left on auto follows the difficulty) — press Generate, and a complete
level appears — walls to dig or ladder over, trenches, spike fields that
force you to steer the column, enemy patrols, turret pillars and a
garrisoned stone keep with the vault — with a toolkit budget sized to what
was placed. Every level also carries a set of tunable rules — troop and
guard hit points, pickaxe and ladder charges, rifle range, crate capacity —
that the designer exposes next to the fall and time limits. Generation is
deterministic, and the same builder produces the game's campaign: a
standard progression of twelve levels that ramps up in length and
difficulty. Press C (or open ?campaign=N) to play it; after a win the
end card offers the next level (N). Any campaign level can be loaded
into the designer, tweaked and shared like a hand-made one.
Generators are pluggable: besides the siege corridor there is an open
arena and a maze — a labyrinth with trapped dead ends, mud on the
route and enemy patrols marching up and down its straights on their own
signs — and docs/generators.md explains how to add another.
For hand-authored or machine-generated levels there is also a command-line
level tool (node scripts/level-tool.mjs levels/, Node 18+, no dependencies):
it validates level JSON strictly against the documented schema, checks that
every entity stands somewhere sensible and that the vault is reachable with the
tools the level hands out, and prerenders isometric and top-down PNG thumbnails
of every level (and of the campaign with --campaign).
The design draws directly on the classic "indirect control" puzzle genre popularized by Lemmings in the early 1990s, crossed with the terrain-driven problem solving of tower-defense and siege games. The twist here is doing it in a fully 3D, editable voxel world rather than a fixed 2D side-view — so walls can be dug through, ladders built, and the battlefield reshaped in ways that change the puzzle as you play it.
It's a small, self-contained hobby project: a single web page, no installs, no accounts, playable directly in a browser.
- Puzzles about crowds, not individuals. Instead of "move this one character to that spot," the challenge is "shape the rules so that this whole group ends up in the right place." It rewards thinking in terms of flow, chokepoints, and cascading consequences rather than direct manipulation — a different kind of problem-solving than most action or strategy games ask for.
- A destructible, buildable battlefield. Because the world is made of voxels, walls can be tunneled through, ladders erected, and terrain permanently altered mid-level. The environment is not just a backdrop; it's part of the puzzle, and part of the toolkit.
- Build your own siege. The included level editor means the game isn't just something to play — it's something to design with. You can build a tower, defend it however you like, and hand a single link to a friend to see if they can crack it.
- Small and approachable. There's no large campaign or grind — it's a compact, readable slice of a larger idea, closer in spirit to a tightly scoped puzzle toy than a AAA production.
- Fans of Lemmings, tower-defense games, or other "indirect control" puzzle genres who want to see the idea reimagined in 3D.
- People who enjoy level editors and homemade puzzle design as much as playing the puzzles themselves.
- Anyone curious about voxel-based games and terrain destruction, but who wants something bite-sized rather than an open-world survival game.
- Puzzle enthusiasts looking for something that rewards planning and systems-thinking over reflexes.
- Developers and hobbyists interested in browser-based 3D games as a genre of small, shareable, link-based experiences — no downloads, no installs, just a URL. group can move through the level. Right-click a builder to pause it and keep its planks for later; right-click again to resume.
- Terrain. Dirt can be dug, stone cannot, spikes kill, and mud slows every troop that wades through it — both yours and the enemy's.