# Bellwarden — Ring bells. Hold the night.

> Ring bells. Hold the night. (iPhone/iPad app by Robert Corbin.)

- Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/bellwarden/id6771789121 (this page in markdown: same URL + `.md`)
- Developer: [Robert Corbin](https://appshunter.io/developer/1890247992)
- Category: Games, Action
- Price: $2.99
- Age rating: 9+
- Requires: iOS 17.0 · 16 MB
- Languages: American English
- Released: 2026-05-26
- Data updated: 2026-08-15
- User reviews in markdown: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/bellwarden/id6771789121/reviews.md

## What is Bellwarden?

Ring the bell. Hold the night.

Bellwarden is a stationary action game built around medieval English bell ringing. You play a bell-ringer in a cathedral tower at the heart of a village. Eight folkloric monsters approach from the dark countryside, and you defend the village by ringing the bells of the tower. Each bell produces a circular sound wave that radiates outward and damages everything inside its reach.

Game features

- Tower Counsel: a private strategy dashboard that analyzes saved nights, recent breaches, method coverage, monster kills, bell unlocks, and tithe upgrades to produce a readiness score, priority threat, method drill, next upgrade recommendation, and copyable Ringer's Brief.
- Ropesight Trainer: choose a bell inside a real method, predict its next place, reveal the path, hear the row, and build an accuracy score without enemies or time pressure.
- Tower Acoustics Lab: compare six original offline tower-bell voices and hear isolated hum, prime, tierce, and nominal partials.
- Eight hand-designed folkloric monsters drawn from public-domain British and Northern European folklore: the Barghest, the Kelpie, the Will-o-Wisp, the Drowned Ringer, Black Annis, Spring-Heeled Jack, the Padfoot, and the Shellycoat. Each monster has its own approach, hit points, and special resistances.
- Six real change-ringing methods modelled on the standard works of English campanology: Plain Hunt on Six, Plain Bob Minor, Grandsire Doubles, Kent Treble Bob Minor, Stedman Triples, and Bristol Surprise Major. Each method's opening rows are encoded in the game as they appear in standard ringing diagrams.
- A stationary, pattern-driven action mechanic: you do not move. You stand at the tower and ring the bells in real campanological sequences. Successful method rows raise a score multiplier that boosts every kill until the next miss.
- Overlapping sound waves stack damage. Two waves passing over the same monster at the same time grant a 1.5x bonus on the second strike, with a further bonus for three or more simultaneous waves.
- Roguelite night-by-night progression. Each successful night earns tithes you can spend on permanent upgrades: faster bell cooldowns, heavier clapper strikes, repair speed for worn bells, a Village Watch militia, and the Great Bell at the eighth slot.
- Bell-physics audio synthesis. Gameplay bells are built from real partial harmonics (hum, prime, tierce, quint, nominal, and octave nominal) with per-partial decay envelopes. Ten original offline reference clips support the Acoustics Lab. No licensed or third-party audio is used.
- Ambient procedural score that modulates with the night-time clock. The score warms toward dawn and cools at midnight.
- Twenty-eight hand-curated achievements covering monster kills, method completions, scoring milestones, a no-breach perfect night, Gauntlet survival milestones, and Guided Drill memory mastery.
- A full bestiary with public-domain folkloric notes for each creature, a campanology primer explaining change ringing in approachable language, and a methods reference page that shows the opening rows of every method.
- On-device SwiftData persistence for nights, achievements, tithes, and unlocks. Stats screen aggregates lifetime kills by kind, longest night, and best score.

No subscriptions. No advertisements. No in-app purchases. No tracking.


## Version history (last 5 releases)

### 2.2 — 2026-07-24

Bellwarden 2.2 deepens the real change-ringing side of the tower:

- Ropesight Trainer: choose a bell, predict its next place, reveal the line, hear each row, and track your accuracy.
- Tower Acoustics Lab: compare six original tower-bell voices and isolate the hum, prime, tierce, and nominal partials.
- Direct access to Ropesight from Methods and the Acoustics Lab from Campanology.
- Refined method guidance and accessibility across iPhone and iPad.

The new lessons and all ten reference clips work entirely offline. No ads, subscriptions, in-app purchases, analytics, or tracking.

### 2.1 — 2026-07-02

The Daily Tolling now keeps your streak: ring the shared daily night on consecutive days and Bellwarden tracks your current and best streaks, with a new Tolling Calendar on the Records page lighting up your last fourteen days. A new Share the Tale button on the end-of-night summary builds a spoiler-free scorecard you can paste into any chat. The Stats page adds a Score Trend chart of your recent nights — gold for dawns reached, stone for nights the tower fell. Also fixed menu labels that could wrap mid-word on smaller iPhones.

### 2.0.1 — 2026-06-23

This update sharpens the interface: the iPad layout now uses a centered, comfortable reading width instead of stretching edge to edge, so every screen reads as a clean column. iPhone is unchanged; still fully on-device.

### 2.0 — 2026-06-21

Bellwarden 2.0 — a big pro upgrade for holding the night, still 100% offline.

• Boon draft: pick 1 of 3 run-scoped upgrades at score milestones for a different build every run.
• Bosses: three telegraphed great foes (Wild Hunt, Lambton Worm, Nuckelavee) with live health bars.
• Tower abilities on cooldowns: Great Peal, Solemn Toll, and Sanctuary.
• Kill-streak combo with a decaying multiplier.
• Daily Challenge: a deterministic seed and modifier each day.
• Three new night creatures (Brag, Church Grim, Yeth Hound) and a grouped folklore bestiary.
• New modes (Vigil, Gauntlet, Daily, Boss Rush), per-mode personal bests, tiered medals, and 8 new achievements.

No account, no network — every run and record stays on your device.

### 1.4 — 2026-06-20

Bellwarden 1.4

Gauntlet Night - a new endless difficulty mode. No dawn ever comes. Enemies scale harder every minute you survive, with rare monsters dominating after wave 5 and pack sizes growing without limit. Your score is measured in time survived and kills landed before the bells fall silent. Four new achievements track the milestone intervals (2, 5, and 10 minutes). Found in the difficulty picker alongside Novice, Warden, and Sexton.

Guided Drill - a new recall-testing mode inside the Methods screen. Unlike Practice (which shows the full row table), Guided Drill hides the sequence and presents each position one at a time as a "?" - you tap the correct bell from memory. Correct taps reveal the bell number in gold and advance the position; mistakes reset the row and break your streak. The header shows live accuracy percentage, current streak, best streak, and method completions. A banner fires on a perfect method cycle (no mistakes). Two new achievements reward first completion and a perfect cycle. Accessible from a new "Guided Drill" button on any unlocked method card.

New achievements (6 added, total now 28): Gauntlet First, Two Minutes Standing, Five-Minute Bell, The Eternal Watch, Tested Memory, Ringer's Memory.

## More apps by Robert Corbin

- [Daily Word Journey](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/daily-word-journey/id6761548266)
- [Hush Secret Text](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/hush-secret-text/id6761658175)
- [Renew Guard](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/renew-guard/id6761755447)
- [Receipt to PDF](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/receipt-to-pdf/id6761782025)
- [Route Your Pay](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/route-your-pay/id6761783719)
- [Tip Arbiter](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/tip-arbiter/id6761786879)

All apps by Robert Corbin: https://appshunter.io/developer/1890247992

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*Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-08-15.*