In the eight years since Slay the Spire was released, I’ve had the game open for 10,001 hours. The vast majority of that time was spent playing it, or analyzing it, or making mods for it. Occasionally I left it open after I stumbled out of my chair to sleep for the night so I could wake up and do it again the next day, and arguably those hours shouldn’t count, but on the other hand, I was often dreaming about the game while I slept.
I can still remember my first run of the game. I played the Ironclad – the only character unlocked when you first launch it – and was offered a Perfected Strike early in the run. “This game’s easy!” I thought, immediately guessing that I could build around Strike synergies and presumably steamroll the beginner-difficulty enemies. I died catastrophically shortly into Act 2. “Oh, this game might be good,” I thought.
Eight years later, I still spend a fairly large amount of my time dying catastrophically in Act 2. I did at some point work out how to win a lot of the time, as well.
With Slay the Spire 2 launching on March 5th, I’m looking forward to something I haven’t had in a long time: new Slay the Spire. The game boasts new flashy features like cooperative play, new characters, new enemies, and the ability to draw various objects on the map with your cursor, but the thing I’m most excited about is learning all the new ways to die to some ridiculous monster that looks like undercooked food or a cross between a bird and a shoe. That’s the joy of Spire; that every time you fail it feels a little bit different, and you learn a little something new, and you feel a little bit like the game’s having fun at your expense and that’s fine. Both of you are having a good time.
Here are my guidelines for myself for starting the game, and maybe they’ll serve you well, also:
- There are no bad cards, only bad situations. Even the lowliest common has some sort of value, and a lot of the fun of the game is finding out where it can be useful. It might not be good against the final bosses, but Slay the Spire challenges you with fights throughout the deckbuilding process, and learning when it’s right to take otherwise “bad” cards in order to survive the fights you’re up against right now is much of the joy of the game.
- The enemies are just as important to deckbuilding as your own deck. It’s not enough to build the perfect poison deck if there’s an enemy you might face that’s immune to poison. Learning how you can fit a few targeted cards into your deck to make sure you can beat your strategy’s most problematic enemies can be a ton of fun.
- There’s no shame in losing! Every loss offers lessons. And even the “right” play will often risk a loss if the cards and rewards don’t fall your way.
- You don’t have to do anything you don’t find fun! Don’t like a certain character? Don’t play them! Don’t like a certain build? Don’t play it. It’s a single player game. We’re all playing to have a good time, so don’t trick yourself out of enjoying it by convincing yourself that the “right” way to play is something that you don’t even like doing.
- Slay the Spire is difficult, and it goes forever, and it’s impossibly complex, and none of us are ever going to work everything out. It’s whatever you want it to be. You can speedrun it, you can play it with friends, you can spend an hour a day playing one floor of one run each morning with your coffee. You can feel good because you found one tiny nuance which saved you 1.2 hitpoints on average even though your exact shuffle meant that following it cost you 5 hitpoints in reality. You can feel bad because you won but can’t shake the feeling that you could have won harder.
The Spire welcomes us! I’m sure I’ll see you in Act 2. I’ll wave as I die to some sort of Flying Eel I can’t beat yet.
Jorbs
Jorbs played poker professionally after college, but found that he was more passionate about teaching concepts for the game than competing at it. He's been streaming strategy games for the last ten years with a focus on teaching and analysis. Several of those years were spent with Slay the Spire 1, where he set various world firsts and created playlists of hundreds of analytical videos.
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