Board Game Review - Slay the Spire

The climb is all there is

Back when Dominion invented the deckbuilder, no one would’ve guessed the impact it would have on video games — but what an impact. Slay the Spire (the video game) went on a decade or so later to create another seminal genre using some of Dominion’s blueprint, namely the “deckbuilder roguelike,” games in which you fight baddies, explore dungeons, and all the while add cards to your electronic “deck.” You’ll continue expanding your deck, thinning out the weaker cards, and picking upgrades to perfect your build to get as far as you can before you inevitably perish and start all over. Slay the Spire and other games that mimicked its formula really demonstrated how much you could expand on the deckbuilder when you’re not limited by the constraints a physical board game places on you — there’s so much more room for randomness, expansiveness, and branching paths when you’re not restricted by what can actually be accomplished with physical cards and tokens. Thus, a board game version of the game that first showed why board games could flourish in the electronic space almost seems like a self-contradiction. But how does it measure up?

Slay the Spire (the board game) came, as all overindulgent boxes that barely fit on your shelf these days seem to — from Kickstarter. I got the fancy version with the neoprene mats and metal coins, which as usual don’t really add anything to the experience, but sure are nice to look at. Right off the bat, as someone who’s sunk an embarrassing number of hours into its digital counterpart, I was pleasantly surprised by how closely Slay the Spire hews to its source material. You’ll see the same player characters, enemies, items to pick up, and cards to add to your deck as in the original, and the general flow of the game is very clever in how it adapts things like the shop, boss fights, and the map you explore.

Each player (up to 4) will choose what character they want to play as, and take their corresponding massive pile of cards. Notably, Slay the Spire comes packed with a bunch of sleeves to put the cards in, and this isn’t just for aesthetics - every card in your deck can be upgraded, and rather brilliantly this can simply be done by turning it around in the sleeve, effectively halving the number of cards that would’ve been required. Your starting deck is relatively boring, but as you advance through encounters you’ll have plenty of opportunities to pick up new cards from your sizeable reward deck, upgrade the ones you’ve got, and get rid of the ones that aren’t as useful anymore.

Each battle plays out rather loosely, as each player simultaneously plays cards from their hand, spending their energy to attack the monsters in their row and defend themselves from their attacks. Initially it feels a bit like multiplayer solitaire, as you don’t begin with a whole lot of things that can benefit your fellow players beyond smacking a baddie in their row once you’ve dealt with your own, but this does begin to change as each player constructs their deck and finds ways to provide each other buffs or place nasty effects on monsters in other rows.

The basic fights cleverly employ “minion” cards, where you’ll essentially draw a random monster for each player, and those random monsters could potentially each come with an outfit of pre-selected baddies to pull from a separate deck. In this way, Slay the Spire manages to give you enough spontaneity in what you’re going to fight while still being able to pair similar or symbiotic monsters together in a way that gives a real challenge. In between regular monster encounters, you’ll be forging a path up each level of the tower that’s also cleverly randomly generated each time thanks to small tokens you place during setup, indicating which spots house the stronger Elite monsters, resting places, shops, or events — also pulled from a randomized deck.

Each floor comes with its own decks of monsters, Elites, and events, all pulled from the video game and adapted extraordinarily well. A single six-sided die manages a lot of the grunt work when it comes to the randomness here. Every round of combat begins by rolling it, and this single die roll will determine what player relics get activated, what certain player cards will do on that turn, and what actions certain monsters will take. Other monsters will have a set progression of abilities they’ll use as turns go on, while others will just do the same thing every time. This is, simply put, a genius way to abstract out all of the random number generation of the video game while still giving you a lot of variety and chance on the table.

Elites and boss monsters are a threat to everyone at the table and have to be dealt with strategically. This is where the simultaneous nature of the game can get a bit dicey, as players will more than likely find themselves redoing certain actions or “unplaying” cards to get the right sequence of events. For instance, maybe you just did big damage to the boss before realizing that the player across from you has the ability to make them vulnerable to the next damage they take — you’ll be hard-pressed not to just say you waited a little bit before you did that. Slay the Spire does little to discourage this, and at the end of the day it’s still heavily reliant on luck of the draw and I feel like the cooperative nature of the game lends itself well to not being too much of a stickler for the nitty-gritty of the rules.

Slay the Spire provides a really satisfying amount of growth and build strategies for each character. Like in the video game, each character can try lots of different strategies depending on what cards they pick up and what relics they find. Some of the most annoying bits (I’m looking at you, Snecko Eye) have been mercifully toned down, and others have been hampered a bit to make them less of an instant win decision, but by and large this is a pretty faithful recreation of one of the greatest PC games I’ve ever played.

However, that raises an important question: does this game even need to exist? I’m not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, it’s a delight to play this cooperatively with all four playable characters at once. It’s fun to see these cards in physical form and be able to actually shuffle and draw them after only being able to click and drag them for so many years. The artwork pops just as nicely in this format, and the coins, player miniatures, and mats all feel and look great (though the sleeves tend to fall apart after a few shuffles). All that said, it’s a pretty hefty time investment compared to its counterpart — un-upgrading every card and carefully slotting everything back into the box is an out-and-out chore that I dread every time we finish a session — and it’s got a sizeable price tag to boot.

I’ve enjoyed my time with Slay the Spire, and if you enjoy the video game and want to try it with a few friends, I’d recommend going for it. But if you haven’t played the original, and especially if you intend to play solo, maybe give the original version a try first. You should actually just do that regardless, because it’s awesome.