Initial Impressions of Slay the Spire, a light rougelike with “deck builder” mechanics

Slay the Spire from Mega Crit Games is a “Roguelite” video game that uses deck-builder mechanics like the ones found in board games like Dominion. It's currently in early access on Steam. I've played for about 9 hours and so far I think it's great.

In the game you're a warrior (there are two classes in the game so far) who must explore “the spire”, encountering monsters, gathering loot, and getting more powerful so you can fight more powerful monsters, etc.. It has a light, cartoony art style that seems well matched to a light turn-based tactical game with RPG elements.

You spend most of your time in the game fighting various monsters (there are common monsters, mini-bosses called “Elites”, and level bosses) using a deck-builder mechanic. Basically, the “moves” you use in the combat are represented by cards that you have in a deck. Each round you draw some cards from your deck which represent what you'll be able to do that turn. Each card has an “energy” cost, and has an effect that's defined on the card, from basic Strikes (which do damage to your enemy) and Blocks (which builds up your defenses from enemy attacks) to more elaborate things. When you've made all the moves you want to, you discard your cards into a discard pile, and your opponent makes their moves. Then you draw more cards, shuffling your discard pile back into a new draw pile if you run out.

Since cards or special powers from magical Relic can modify lots of parameters (like how many cards you draw, how much energy you have to spend in a turn, bonus damage for attacks or bonus blocks for defends, and lots of other things as well) there's room for a huge amount of combos and synergies, as well as interesting negative effects like being forced to shuffle useless or even harmful cards into your deck as a result of being cursed. Personally I dislike physically manipulating cards in board games (I'm always afraid I'll bend the cards, plus I'm not good at shuffling), but the deck-builder framework is an excellent way to build lots of meaningful choices into every move you make, so being able to get the game-design benefits of a deck-builder while having the computer take care of the details is great in my book. Computerizing the cards also offers some options that might be difficult to implement with physical cards, such as an attack that starts out weak but gets more powerful each time you use it in a combat. Winning the combats earns you loot, usually in the form of gold, potions, and new cards to add to your deck, usually with fancier powers than the basic cards you start the dungeon with.

The dungeon exploring itself is done on a branching-path map. Most of the nodes are regular combats with either regular monsters or bosses.

Some are encounters that offer you a simple choice or other chance. They're amusingly illustrated and the text uses color and a wiggly-text visual effect that meshes well with the tone of the game:

Some of the nodes are camp areas where you can recover some hitpoints or upgrade one of your cards. Some are treasure chests where you can get relics:

And some are shops where you can use the gold you've been collecting to buy new cards and relics:

With each successful run through the dungeon you unlock new cards and relics that can show up the next time you run through, so there should be a huge amount of replayability as the new elements open up new strategies or variations on old ones. Right now I'm having a ton of fun with this game, more than with any game I've played in a while. I hope that continues for the long haul, but even if it eventually burns out I've already gotten a lot out of the game in the hours I have played.