Slay the Spire

Slay the Spire is a roguelike deck-building video game developed by the American independent studio Mega Crit Games, in which a lone character fights up a randomly generated tower by playing cards drawn from a deck built during the run.³⁶ It combines the permadeath and forking-path progression of the roguelike with the card-play and synergy-building of a deck-building card game, and released from early access in January 2019.³¹⁸ Metacritic recorded a critic score of 89 for the PC version based on 24 reviews, and an “89” aggregate across all platforms.¹⁸

Gameplay

The player selects one of three playable characters and ascends a spire made of a randomly generated map of nodes, each of which may lead to a battle, a merchant, a treasure chest, a random event, or a campfire where the character can rest to heal or upgrade a card.¹²⁴ Combat is turn-based: at the start of each turn the player draws a hand of cards from the deck and receives three points of “energy,” which are spent to play attack, defense, and skill cards.² Reducing an enemy’s health to zero advances the character up the tower; running out of health ends the run and forces a restart from scratch.³ Each run typically takes less than an hour.⁴

The three classes each draw from a distinct card pool and play very differently: the warrior-like Ironclad favors high damage and strength-building; the roguish Silent specializes in poison and cheap “Shiv” attacks; and the Defect is a sentient robot that channels elemental orbs.¹³ The game began early access with only the Ironclad and Silent, the Defect being added later; the designers said in early 2018 they had roughly 75 cards for the Ironclad and preferred to add new characters with unique card pools rather than bloat any one class.⁵¹⁰ Building the deck happens entirely during play — new cards are chosen one of three at a time after each victory, and a merchant can be paid to permanently remove cards, making a lean, focused deck a central strategic goal.¹⁴ Over 100 relics, found in chests, events, and boss fights, act as passive modifiers that can transform how a character plays.²

A defining design feature is that enemies telegraph their next move: each enemy’s “intent” is shown above its head, telling the player whether it will attack, defend, buff itself, or apply a debuff, and how much damage an attack will do.³¹⁷ The game offers additional modes beyond the standard campaign, including a daily challenge, an Ascension mode that layers on escalating difficulty modifiers, and a custom mode with roughly 15 toggleable modifiers, which was added as the game’s third mode around the time it passed one million copies sold.³⁶

Development

The game was made by two principal designers, Anthony Giovannetti and Casey Yano, who first met in college and reconnected after time in the software industry; both lived in Seattle, Washington and worked largely apart, meeting for what Yano called “intense design days” on which they might generate 50 card ideas and 20 enemy ideas.⁵¹⁰²³ Yano handled programming and art, while Giovannetti led design.⁵¹⁰ One of the first prototypes dates to September 2015, and Yano said the game took about two years to make.¹²²³ Slay the Spire entered early access on Windows, macOS, and Linux in late 2017 and climbed the Steam charts in the following weeks.²³

Giovannetti, a competitive player of the card game Netrunner? who ran the fansite stimhack.com, recruited top-tier Netrunner players to playtest the game early in development.⁵¹⁰ The enemy-intent system that became central to the design was not part of the original vision; the developers first tried a “Next Turn” system, seen in a prototype from March 2016, that used a text bar to describe what the enemy would do, but abandoned it because it worked poorly against multiple enemies, replacing it with always-visible icons they called the Intents system.⁷¹² Yano illustrated the spire’s bestiary as deliberately strange creatures — rats hosting parasites, metallic conch-like beasts that sprout insect legs — to avoid generic fantasy imagery.⁵¹⁰

Lineage and influence

Slay the Spire fused the deck-building card game with the roguelike.³⁷ Its designers were, in the words of a developer interview, “focused on fusing a game like Dominion, the card game which probably founded the deck-building genre, with the Rogue-like,” and took the names of its basic Block and Strike cards and its core energy-and-map design from that early prototyping.¹² Giovannetti’s background as a card-game player, particularly his admiration for Netrunner’s design, shaped the game’s tightly interlocking card sets.⁵¹⁰ Commentators identified Dominion? and Ascension: Deckbuilding Game among the tabletop deck-builders that influenced it.²²

On the roguelike side, the developers cited FTL? as an inspiration, and reviewers described Slay the Spire’s forking-path structure and random events as loosely following FTL’s model.¹²¹⁷ The game appeared alongside Into the Breach?, another roguelike from FTL’s makers that likewise shows players what enemies will do next, though the developers said they were unaware of Into the Breach’s specifics during development.¹² Reviewers also placed it in a lineage with The Binding of Isaac?, whose transformative random items resemble Slay the Spire’s relics.²⁴ It was not the first deck-building roguelike — Dream Quest and Hand of Fate preceded it — but it is widely regarded as the game that took the genre mainstream.¹³

Slay the Spire’s success spawned numerous imitators and a broad “roguelike deck-builder” subgenre, with later games such as Monster Train and Dawncaster building on its template.¹³²⁰ In 2024 it was adapted into a cooperative tabletop game, Slay the Spire: The Board Game, published by Contention Games, translating the digital deck-builder back to physical cards while adding multiplayer cooperation.¹³¹⁴¹⁹ A sequel, Slay the Spire 2, entered development and was shown at The Game Awards in 2024.¹⁷

Slay the Spire - Official Launch TrailerMega Crit

Release and reception

After its early-access period, Slay the Spire released for PC on January 23, 2019, and later expanded to consoles and mobile, including versions for Nintendo Switch and an Android release published under Humble Bundle’s mobile label.¹⁸²⁰²¹ As of July 2026 the Android version held a 4.6 rating from about 29,300 reviews on Google Play, though mobile reviewers criticized the touch interface’s card-selection controls.²⁰ Critics praised the game’s blend of genres and the depth of its card synergies; Eurogamer called it “a gorgeous blend of dungeon-crawler and card-battler” and PCGamesN scored it 9 out of 10, describing it as “the best solo deck-builder yet”.³¹⁷ It had sold one million copies by the time custom mode was added.⁶