The Game – Slay the Spire

I’ve already talked a lot about the video game and the board game. So let’s dive into a bit more detail on the character(s) as I go. Because characters have different ways that you can build out their decks. Now, not all of them will work every time, you need to adjust and adapt to the cards you get. But what are the different builds you can do with the Silent?

There are two main builds for the Silent, and you saw a blended one last night. But they are either a shiv build or a poison build. I had a lot of shivs to go with my poison, but often times you’re doing one or the other. Mainly because there are powers that make either more effective.

For the shiv build you are looking to get as many shivs as possible to deal free damage on a turn. If you can throw 6 shivs a turn, that’s 24 damage on two energy. And that is good, but then there are things, like accuracy for shivs, that add to the damage. Now you would be doing 48 damage a turn, or with even more accuracy maybe 72 damage. It’s about doing as many of those zero cost attacks as you can.

Poison, on the other hand, is often more passive. You are looking to get poison onto a monster and defend while that poison damage takes them out. If you can hunker down long enough, and have cards like Noxious Fumes to passively add more poison, you can eventually take down a monster. And with the cards for poison, most anyways, not being attacks, you can get some other benefits if you have the right relics.

Upcoming Streams

So let’s look ahead to what is coming up next. On Wednesday I am going to be streaming more Lands of Galzyr. I had a great time with the first stream, so join me and see what story is going to be coming up for our polecat. What adventures will he go on this time and will he do better than before?

And then next Monday, my plan will be to play another board game. I have a few that I can pull off of the shelf, and once things are a bit neater in here, one of my projects was in the game room, it should be easier to get them to the table. And I’m tempted to play Paper Dungeons again since it’s been a while. But we will see about possibly learning a new game like Set a Watch or Bullet Star.

And as always, if you want to know when I go live, you can subscribe and click the notification bell.

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The Game

In Slay the Spire you are battling through rooms as you climb your way up three levels of a tower. Each of the levels get progressively harder, but that’s okay, because you get more and better cards. Like a standard deck building game, you start with a certain number of cards, generally 10, enough for two hands. You’ll have some basic attacks and basic defenses, but as you clear rooms, and beat monsters, you get the option to add more cards to your deck. These cards can give you better defense, more attack, or maybe even some permanent affect like dealing poison at the start of each of your turns. You also get relics which can do all sorts of crazy things, some give you more energy to spend, make attacks or defense better, heal you, give you an extra card every few turns, or more gold. If you can survive all the way to the top of the tower you’ve won, if not, you start at the bottom again and climb away.

What Doesn’t Work

Some climbs are just going to be better than others. When you get cards and relics, they are fairly random. Sure with cards you can pick from three, but if it doesn’t work with your strategy do you take a less ideal card or just skip a card all together. And some relics are way better than others depending on what you are doing, attacks that cost 0 doing 4 more damage is great for The Silent if you are going with one build, but if you are going for poison, way less useful. So there is that randomness. But honestly, that is the only thing that I’d consider a weakness in the game. And since the runs are fast.

What Works

The room system works really well. You are given a branching path up each level and you can see the whole thing. So if I know that I want to go to a merchant room as fast as possible, I can plan for that. If I just want to fight for a little bit, can do that. If I want the random rooms, they are easy to plan around as well. Overall, the whole room system just works really well because you can plot your course to some extent and choose what you are looking for. I go for routes that will optimize how many relics I get, permanent effects, because I like to get a lot of them. But if you want to optimize your health, it’s probably better to avoid those epic monsters.

I also like the characters. There are four different characters that you can get in the game. You start with one and when you get far enough, you unlock another and then another, and another. It is a blast to play the different characters, and the characters are really different. The Ironclad is your most basic aggressive character who is going to be able to dish out massive hits. Then the Silent gives you either shivs or poison but is about dishing out damage in a more defensive way. I’ll let you find out about the other two characters yourself, if the game is interesting. But they are more complex.

Each character has multiple ways to play them as well which is awesome. The Ironclad, I said that he’s good for dealing massive amounts of damage, and that’s true. But you can also play them more defensively. The Silent you can either build towards poison or shivs. It might overlap later as you go though. But each strategy is viable. And this is where some of the randomness that I was talking about can be bad. If I build the silent to attack with shivs and then I start getting all poison cards, I’m going to end up with a weird mix and be less effective. But if I get the right cards, you can do crazy combos that make the game a ton of fun.

Who Is This Game For?

Is this just a video game for board gamers? I don’t think so, I think a lot of players of video games will enjoy the rogue-like nature of each run. The deck building aspect is there, and it comes from board games, but it’s an easy enough concept to understand. So I think this game with it’s low barrier of entry and fun game play will work for a lot of people. The hard core FPS players, now, maybe they won’t like it as much but the more casual player, this game is a blast.

Final Thoughts

There aren’t a ton of video games that I come back to over and over again. I like video games as a concept, but too often I’ll play, get distracted, forget where I am in a story and have to start over again. Slay the Spire is not like that. Slay the Spire is simple to play for an hour, stop and do something else for a week and then drop back it and play again. It reminds me of some older video games that way. You play them for a little bit and then you put it down, and pick it up whenever you want. The less time I have to play longer games, at least video games, the more I appreciate games like this.

Overall Grade: B+
Gamer Grade: B
Casual Grade: A