#DHSeaDev · HTML5 · Browser · Idle · Fantasy
Spirebound
Spirebound is an idle game about growing a wizard’s tower. You build rooms that make mana, hire apprentices, send familiars out on expeditions, learn runes and compose your own spells, and Ascend when growth slows to rewrite your grimoire. It runs in your browser from one file, it is free, and the tower keeps working for up to two hours after you close the tab.
Version 0.3.3. Free, with no ads, no real-money purchases and no account needed to play. Cloud save is optional and off until you sign in. It lives on its own address, so its login is kept apart from the rest of the DHSeaDev arcade.
What do you do in Spirebound?
You tend a tower and let it grow. Spend mana on rooms, hire apprentices to raise the rate, send familiars on expeditions, learn runes, and shape them into spells with a shape and a modifier. When growth slows, Ascend: you give up the tower’s progress and keep sigils that make the next climb faster. There is no way to lose progress by being away.
Six rooms, 22 research nodes
Six rooms to build and upgrade, from the Ley Well to the Observatory, and a research tree of 22 nodes that unlocks new systems as you go.
Spells you compose
Fourteen runes: five elements, four spell shapes and five modifiers, plus a plain option. The elements beat each other in a cycle, so what you bring to a fight matters.
Familiars and expeditions
Six familiars and five expedition zones, from the Barrow to the Spire. Send them out, and they come back with what the tower needs.
Ascension and a pantheon
Ascend for sigils from an eleven-node tree, and summon one of five gods whose favour changes how a run plays.
Gentle side games
A Hedge Maze, Rival’s Table, a Gauntlet, a Chronicle and wisps hatched from any text. They are calm and never required.
57 achievements
Many are for what you do rather than what you collect. A small daily gift waits for any day you visit, and missing a day costs nothing.
Built to be read
Seven colour themes including a light one and a true-black one, a text-size control, a high-contrast mode and reduced-motion support. There is a guided start with optional lessons for spells, familiars, gods and wisps, a command palette, and a mobile layout that was walked at phone and tablet widths in a headless browser. Share cards make a picture of your tower on your device, to post anywhere.
Questions
Is Spirebound free?
Yes. It is free to play in your browser, with no ads, no real-money purchases and no account to make.
Does it keep playing when I close the tab?
Yes, for up to two hours. When you come back, the game tells you what the tower did while you were away. The two-hour limit is fixed, so there is nothing to set.
Where are my saves kept?
The game saves itself on your device as you play. If you want to keep a tower safe and play it on another device, use the optional Cloud save in Settings, which needs an email address and a password. Clearing your browser’s site data deletes the save on that device unless Cloud save was on.
Can I play it without a mouse?
Yes. The controls I tested have a keyboard route, and Settings lists the shortcuts. There are also seven themes, a text-size control, a high-contrast mode and reduced motion.
Privacy
The short version: Spirebound plays entirely on your device until you choose to turn on Cloud save.
| What | Answer |
|---|---|
| Data collected | None, unless you sign in to Cloud save. Then your email address and your save are stored so you can load the tower on another device. |
| Accounts or sign-in | Optional. You can play without one. |
| Network requests | None while you play signed out. Measured on the live page: loading it makes one request, for the page itself. Signed in, it talks to Google’s Firebase sign-in and database services and nowhere else. |
| Ads, real-money purchases, analytics | None of any of them. |
| Where your save lives | On this device, and in your Cloud save if you turned it on. |
| Deleting your save | Use Reset game in Settings, or clear your browser’s site data for the page you play on. |
What is not done yet
- Sign-in on the live site has been confirmed working by the developer. A save on one device loaded on another has not been tested yet, so treat Cloud save as new.
- Audio on iPad and Safari, and screen-reader use, have not been tested on real devices.
- The mobile layout is tested in a headless browser at phone sizes, not yet on real phones.
Read more
Other idle games from the same shelf: Mosslight, Singularity Tower and Spellsurge. How the arcade works is in How the arcade works. Every game and where to play it is on the games index.
Built by #DHSeaDev. Questions: dhseadev@gmail.com