Slay the Spire (2019)
Slay the Spire is a 2019 role-playing (rpg) video game made by Mega Crit Games and Humble Games.
Climb a monster-filled tower one floor at a time, building a deck of cards as you go and hoping the relics you pick keep you alive. This roguelike deckbuilder fuses card-game strategy with permadeath: win a fight, choose a new card, and watch your deck sharpen or bloat with every decision. Four distinct characters play nothing alike, and the enemies force constant retuning of a plan. A bad run ends fast; a great one snowballs into something broken and glorious. Easy to grasp, brutal to master, and almost impossible to put down.
Quick answers
What is Slay the Spire about?
Climb a monster-filled tower one floor at a time, building a deck of cards as you go and hoping the relics you pick keep you alive. This roguelike deckbuilder fuses card-game strategy with permadeath: win a fight, choose a new card, and watch your deck sharpen or bloat with every decision. Four distinct characters play nothing alike, and the enemies force constant retuning of a plan. A bad run ends fast; a great one snowballs into something broken and glorious. Easy to grasp, brutal to master, and almost impossible to put down.
When was Slay the Spire released?
Slay the Spire was released on 23 January 2019.
Who made Slay the Spire?
Slay the Spire was made by Mega Crit Games and Humble Games.
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Explore Slay the Spire guides
Slay the Spire in our writing
- Companion guide: Deals with the Devil
- Companion guide: Roguelike & Roguelite: The Complete Guide to Die and Retry
A few thoughts on Slay the Spire
Anyone hooked on tuning a deck run after run should try Inscryption, which wraps deckbuilding in eerie mystery, and Monster Train, which stacks the same ideas across multiple lanes. Balatro pushes the compulsive one-more-run pull into poker-hand territory and rarely lets go.
Climbing a gauntlet that gets deadlier with every floor
Slay the Spire is a straight climb: one floor clears into the next, each a little more lethal than the last, until a single mistake ends the run. Made in Abyss, Hunter x Hunter's Heaven's Arena arc, Wizard and Glass and Saint Seiya's Sanctuary arc all build the same vertical gauntlet, heroes pushing upward through floors that only get harder.
Albums as technical and demanding as a perfect run
Slay the Spire rewards the kind of player who studies a system until every card and relic clicks into a bigger plan, then plays that plan out with total precision. In the Court of the Crimson King, The Spectre Within, IX Equilibrium and Painkiller ask the same of a listener, records built from intricate, demanding parts that only pay off once you're locked in.
Fantasy series where the stakes climb with every chapter
Slay the Spire never lets a run get comfortable, each new act raising the danger past what worked before. Oathbringer, Brisingr, Redwall and The Girl Who Drank the Moon build the same kind of climb, fantasy quests where the threat keeps scaling up and the characters have to grow just as fast to survive it.