Life After Slay The Spire: Roguelike Deckbuilders to Play Next
Christian Haines, Managing Editor
Like many, I rediscovered my love of deckbuilding games through Slay the Spire. I say “rediscovered” because the game gave me the same pleasure I experienced when playing booster draft tournaments of Magic: The Gathering back in the 90s. In those days, each attempt at ascending the metaphorical spire to card-based victory meant handing over my hard-earned allowance. It was a revelation when MicroProse released its 1997 digital version of Magic: The Gathering. Not only could you play as a powerful planeswalker in its single-player campaign, but you could also duel AI-controlled opponents and even other humans. The requirement of buying pack after pack of cards in the hope that that one rare creature would eventually appear disappeared. Now, a single up-front cost meant endless hours of play.
Image courtesy of MegaCrit Press Kits.
The strength of deckbuilding games lies in their modular design. By definition, they involve discrete segments (cards) arranged in complex permutations (hands, decks, cards in play). The fun in these games is seeing how these permutations play out. What’s more thrilling than vanquishing your foe after drawing the perfect card? Pair that with the roguelike structure of runs, in which everything’s at stake in each duel, and you’ve got one of the most compelling set of game design principles since the invention of the CRPG.
Of course, it’s not as if Slay The Spire came out of thin air. I doubt it would have appeared if it weren’t for Hearthstone. But the pleasure of Slay is distinct, in large part because it doesn’t revolve around monetary transactions, an endless series of expansions, and a frighteningly complex metagame. Slay has introduced new cards and characters, but there’s always a sense that everything you need is right there, in this run on this screen, not in some booster pack next to your local comic bookstore’s cash register.
At a certain point, however, you’re going to need a break from Slay The Spire. It’s not that the game’s run out of options – you’re not exactly bored – but you do start to wonder what would it be like if Slay had a sci-fi setting or an overarching narrative. Or maybe you imagine what it would be like if, as in Magic, you could command an army of creatures. Or maybe you’re simply longing for some lush art, graphics reminiscent of the fantasy illustrations from early D&D monster manuals. Whatever you seek, dear player, I have good news for you: the success of Slay the Spire has meant that a number of other developers have crafted similar experiences, reinventing the roguelike deckbuilder in exciting ways. Here are a few of my favorites:
Monster Train (Shiny Shoe)
Some of you have probably already heard of Monster Train, and for good reason. It’s a brilliant game in which you conduct a train through hell, using monsters and spells to combat, well, other monsters and spells. The genius of the game is two-fold. First, there’s the incorporation of tower defense mechanics. Each battle sees you protecting your pyrestone, the loss of which means the end of your run. The battles take place on your train, which is composed of three levels capable of holding only a limited number of monsters. Each of your opponent’s monsters that you don’t vanquish on one floor move up to the next floor, inching towards your pyrestone and generating a steady increase of suspense. The other brilliant aspect of Monster Train is that in each run, you choose two monster clans, each with their own distinct set of monsters and spells. Half the fun of the game is seeing what kinds of combinations might occur between different clans’ cards. There’s more to the game, including (as in Slay The Spire) choosing between branching paths during your run, each with their own encounters. But what’s most compelling about Monster Train is that each match ends with a boss fight, a climactic moment in which everything is on the line. Monster Train successfully condenses the dynamics of the different levels of Slay the Spire into each match, producing an experience that, dare I say it, is even more compelling.
Banners of Ruin (Montebearo)
If you’ve been wishing that Slay The Spire was more like an RPG, then Banners of Ruin is for you. The game is set in a fantasy world that resembles the classic Forgotten Realms of D&D, with the twist that your characters are different animal species, such as bears, mice, beavers, and weasels. These different species have different strengths. Weasels specialize in poisoning their enemies, while bears unsurprisingly excel in brute force attacks. At the beginning of each run, you choose two characters from these species, each of whom you will have the opportunity to level up and equip with special items and weapons. There are elements of a story that involve you sneaking into a city, but these elements seem more like flavor text than a fleshed out narrative campaign. However, that doesn’t stop the game from offering the excitement of a dungeon crawl. After each match, you’re presented with three possible choices of encounters, some involving combat, others involving anecdotes (sneaking past drunken guards, for example), or even chances to recruit additional party members. All of this RPG goodness is wrapped in a beautiful art style that recalls the earlier days of D&D or the Mouseguard series of comics. Although it’s still in early access, Banners of Ruin already has a great deal of content and I haven’t encountered any bugs. If the developers can weave a more compelling story to match the already great atmosphere and mechanics, they’ll have something truly special on their hands.
Meteorfall: Krumit’s Tale (Slothwerks)
Meteorfall: Krumit’s Tale is the roguelike deckbuilder that I would introduce a child to – and I mean that in the best way. It’s accessible without being simplistic, inventive in its mechanics without being gimmicky. It combines a cartoonish art style, resembling Adventure Time, with a quirky sense of humor, in which the titular Krumit is a heckling dungeon master. You pick a character, each of which represents a different class with their own special abilities. (And, of course, you start with that old stalwart, the fighter.) You then work your way around a colorful overworld map, each stop representing a dungeon crawl. The clever gameplay reworks the mechanics of tile-based mobile games: levels consist of a 3x3 board of cards, each card representing a weapon, potion, treasure chest, or enemy. You might select a weapon card to use against enemy card and then follow it up with a potion to heal yourself. It’s wonderfully simple, but it also can be incredibly challenging. As you eliminate cards, other cards slide down onto the board, eventually revealing a boss to test your limits. Beating levels earns you currency, which you can spend in Krumit’s shop to insert new, more powerful cards into each dungeon’s deck. Additionally, you also pick up mutations for your character, some of which drastically change how you play. Krumit’s Tale is on iOS and Android phones, as well as Steam, and it’s the perfect game to play while walking your dog or sitting in a park (masked up and socially distanced, of course).
Ring of Pain (Simon Boxer, Twice Different)
Ring of Pain pares down the roguelike deckbuilding formula to its minimal form: instead of choosing from a hand of cards, you’re choosing which direction to move around a ring of cards. You build up your character’s stats (defense, attack, luck) by picking up weapon, spell, and modifier cards, and then you test your stats against enemies. Each ring represents a dungeon and the goal is to move around the larger ring containing the dungeon rings. In Ring of Pain, you’re not really building a deck or playing a hand. Instead, you’re navigating a circular dungeon, trying to order encounters in the right sequence so that you survive. You don’t have to eliminate all the enemies in each dungeon-ring, just make it to the exit. The challenge and pleasure of this navigation comes from your incomplete knowledge of what’s lurking in the ring – you generally only get to see the full details of the front 2 cards – and your ability, if you’re lucky enough to pull the right card, to tactically reshuffle the order of cards in the ring.
The beauty of Ring of Pain’s gameplay is also, arguably, its weakness. Its minimalism lends a brutal air to your encounters – it’s easy to be brought down in the first few rings – and your ability to actively cultivate a larger strategy from ring to ring is almost nil. At the same time, it intensifies runs, making each one feel like a gauntlet from which you will be lucky to escape. That atmosphere is strengthened by a horror-leaning art style of sharp lines and dissonant colors and scattered dialogue that hints at a disturbing and mysterious tale in which the player is caught. Don’t trust the owl; don’t trust anything in the rings.
Nowhere Prophet (Sharkbomb)
If Ring of Pain is an effort to strip the roguelike deckbuilder down to its fundamentals, Nowhere Prophet is a maximalist project that leaves no option off the table. Not only do you craft 2 different decks – your hero and follower decks – but you also manage resources, upgrade your hero, equip gear, make narrative decisions, and more. It can be overwhelming, but the game provides enough tutorial guidance so that you never feel lost. The game’s fiction puts you in charge of a caravan crossing a postapocalyptic wasteland. Moving from one location to another costs resources, meaning you have to balance that cost against your decisions in encounters. You might have a choice between visiting an outpost in one location or combat in another. The chance to upgrade your hero through combat sounds appealing, but then you recall that a number of your followers are injured from a previous battle, so you’re better off stopping at an outpost to heal them.
Like Monster Train and Banners of Ruin, Nowhere Prophet requires you to think tactically about how you place your cards in battle. You and your opponent occupy opposite sides of the screen, each side divided up into rows and columns, dotted by groves of trees, mountains, and other obstacles. Your followers can only engage directly in combat in the front row, though certain cards (like snipers) can break this rule. Cards placed behind the front line might give bonuses – buffs – to other cards or your hero. Nowhere Prophet offers the most strategic and tactical density of any of the games on this list. That density comes with obvious problems in terms of balance. With so many different systems, a run can go downhill quickly. For instance, you might run out of resources for travel, so that despite the many excellent cards you’ve collected, progress grinds to a halt. However, the abundance of systems also produces the feeling of traveling through a world instead of bouncing from one random encounter to another. And with that world comes a story told as much through the interaction of systems as through the flavor text. It’s easily the most ambitious, if also sometimes the clunkiest, of the games on this list.
