Cathartic Tower Defense TD

Your towers don't cost gold. They cost knowledge.

Cathartic is a tower defense game where every tower is built by answering flashcards. Get the word right and your defenses rise; hesitate and the horde closes in on your citadel. Learning is not a minigame on the side. It is the resource system.

HOW IT PLAYS
• Tap a build spot and a flashcard appears. Answer it to raise the tower.
• Recall and grade yourself, type the answer, or draw the character stroke by stroke.
• A spaced-repetition scheduler decides what you see next, so words you almost know come back right before you forget them.
• Win battles to earn knowledge and spend it in the armory on stronger towers and units.

DEFEND WITH TEN ELEMENTS
Raise barracks and summon fighters to hold the line while your towers do the talking.

REALLY LEARN A LANGUAGE
• You can bring your own decks. Cathartic imports .apkg files and plain-text (CSV/TSV) exports, so an existing Anki collection just works, and your progress can be merged back.
• Japanese and Chinese with handwriting recognition: draw kana, kanji and hanzi in the correct stroke order and the game checks every stroke.
• Ready-made decks for Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Norwegian, Czech, Swahili, Latin, and English.
• Audio cards teach you how words actually sound.
• Not just languages: anything you can put on a flashcard, from anatomy to exam dates, works.
• Track your streak, statistics and achievements as your knowledge grows.

JUST WANT TO PLAY?
Switch learning off and play the pure match-3 mode. Same battles, no flashcards.

FREE, NO ACCOUNT NEEDED
Play as a guest with nothing to sign up for. Sign in only when you want your progress synced across devices and a spot on the leaderboard. Optional Google Drive sync keeps your collection in your own Drive.

No ads. No tracking.

A network connection is needed for deck downloads, sync and the leaderboard. Battles themselves play offline.