Clash of Clans

You start with a Town Hall and two Builder's Huts, and the game is honest about the shape of it: almost everything you improve takes time and one of a handful of builders, so the queue you line up between sessions does a lot of the deciding.

Two villages, one account

The Home Village is the main game. You raise a Town Hall to unlock more buildings and higher levels of the ones you own, spend Gold on defences and town upgrades, and spend Elixir on offensive buildings and troop research in the Laboratory. Dark Elixir appears at Town Hall 7 and feeds the darker troops, the heroes and their upgrades.

The Builder Base is a second village with its own rules, reached by boat, and its attacking works differently in two ways. First, it is not head to head. You attack other people's bases on your own schedule and your own base is attacked separately, whenever somebody else finds it, with trophies settling on both sides from those two fights — which is why you can keep attacking as soon as your own battle ends instead of waiting on an opponent. Second, from Builder Hall 6 a base is split into two stages. Only the first is visible until it is completely destroyed, and if you clear it you get the remains of your army, reinforcements from your Reinforcement Camps and a second planning minute to finish the job. Stars are scored on each stage rather than once across the whole base, which is how a single Builder Base attack can be worth up to six.

Training costs nothing, which changes the whole rhythm

This is the change that matters most to returning players. Training costs were removed in 2022, so an army no longer eats Elixir before it leaves the barracks, and the 2025 Clash Anytime update went further and removed troop, spell and siege machine training times along with the wait to heal a hero. Your troops are simply there when you want them. What is left as your constraint is camp capacity: you can attack whenever you want, but you can only bring what fits.

Attacks are rated on three stars and run to a three minute limit. Fifty percent destruction is one star, taking the Town Hall is another, and flattening the base is the third. With the waiting gone, more of the pressure sits on the plan: which army you cooked, where you commit it, and whether the second half of the attack still makes sense once the first half has told you the layout.

Heroes are half of the army

Heroes are managed from the Hero Hall, which unlocks at Town Hall 4 and is where the Barbarian King arrives with it. The current line-up runs Barbarian King, Archer Queen, Minion Prince, Grand Warden, Royal Champion and Dragon Duke; the Builder Base has its own two, the Battle Machine and the Battle Copter. Each hero brings an ability you fire during the attack, which is why an army without its heroes behaves nothing like the same army with them.

Hero Equipment, added in late 2023, sits on top of that. The Blacksmith unlocks at Town Hall 8 and is where you change what a hero's abilities actually do, with each hero carrying two pieces at a time on attack, and the equipment levels up using three kinds of Ore: Shiny, Glowy and Starry. That makes heroes a long-term project with its own currency, separate from the Elixir and Dark Elixir you spend on their levels, and it means two players with the same heroes can be running quite different abilities.

Clans, wars and the Clan Capital

Clans hold up to fifty players, and Clan Wars are the reason to be in one. Each member gets two attacks against the opposing clan, stars are scored the same way they are in a normal raid, and the clan with more stars at the end of War Day takes it. A tie is decided by which clan caused more destruction overall, which is a real incentive to finish bases rather than farm easy stars.

The Clan Capital is the group's shared base, built and upgraded by everyone, and its Raid Weekends are a separate weekend activity where you attack other clans' Capitals for Capital Gold and Raid Medals. Capital Gold goes back into the Capital itself, while Raid Medals are spent on things for your own village, so a weekend of raiding pays both the group and the member.

Above the wars sit the competitive layers. Clan War Leagues put clans into monthly leagues against each other, and they change the shape of a war: each player gets a single attack per war day rather than the two of a normal war, so every attack carries more weight. Clan Games ask the whole clan to hit milestones for magic items, and Ranked Mode and Legend League are where individual players climb a public ladder. There are practice routes too: Friendly Challenges let you test a layout or an army against a clanmate, Friendly Wars run a whole war between two clans by arrangement, and replays let you watch how your defence actually performed rather than guessing from the score.

Current state of the village

The game has moved to Town Hall 18, which landed in late 2025 and has since picked up extra supercharge levels and a new pet tier. The Dragon Duke hero and the Greedy Raven pet arrived in a separate update early in 2026, so do not expect to find them waiting the moment you hit the new Town Hall. If you are returning from an older account, the things to re-learn are probably Hero Equipment from Town Hall 8, Super Troops at Town Hall 11 — boosted with Dark Elixir, with two types able to be active at once — pets from the Pet House at Town Hall 14, and siege machines from the Workshop at Town Hall 12.

Should you play it

Yes, if you want a long game with a short daily ritual. Logging in to move a builder, cook an army and take two war attacks is a satisfying loop, upgrades are permanent, and the free-training change means the account you left behind is still worth coming back to rather than a fresh start.

Skip it if you want to be competitive this month. There are three more builders to buy with Gems once the tutorial is done, a sixth that has to be earned through Builder Base progress, and an upgrade ladder long enough that the queue becomes a project of its own. Gems and shop bundles are what turn that queue into a shortcut. It is the oldest kind of mobile strategy game, and it is still running because that structure works.