Slay the Spire's The Watcher is the game's fourth playable character, and she's finally here. This blind monk heads into battle wielding a staff, but much of her power comes from her ability to enter different stances, each of which drastically changes the way she plays. 

Correct use of these stances holds the potential for incredible power, but also make  Slay the Spire's 4th character tough to master. Here’s how to get to grips with her, as well as a couple of deck ideas to get you going.

How to play The Watcher in Slay the Spire

The Watcher’s most important mechanic is her use of stances. There are three different stances which allow The Watcher to use other cards; Calm, Wrath, and Divinity. The Watcher cannot have No Stance.

The Watcher starts each encounter in No Stance, which has no effect on her other cards. The two most common stances are Calm, which grants 2 energy once you leave it, and Wrath, which causes The Watcher to both deal and receive double damage as long as she remains in it.

The final stance is Divinity. When The Watcher enters this stance, she gains 3 energy, and while in it, she deals triple damage, but will automatically leave Divinity at the end of her turn. This is the most powerful stance, but the most difficult to enter. While Calm and Wrath can be entered and exited by a number of cards, Divinity is only activated by gaining 10 Mantra, a resource only gathered by a small number of cards, or by playing the card Blasphemy, which kills The Watcher at the beginning of her next turn. 

Timing is key when playing as Slay the Spire's Watcher. Many decks leverage her ability to retain cards until they can be used most effectively by swapping stances. The easiest way to do this is by using Wrath’s damage multiplier, but doing so makes it easy to open yourself up to unnecessary damage. 

It’s a good idea to keep a card to hand that will let you enter Calm: not only will using that stance help avoid any extra punishment, it’ll provide extra energy ahead of your next move. Similarly you can use Divinity to empower your attacks more with less risk, but be careful not to overcommit.

The best Slay the Spire Watcher decks

Like the other three classes, The Watcher begins each run with a starting relic and a basic deck. She starts with four strikes and defends, and one card for entering Wrath and Calm—Eruption deals 9 damage and enters Wrath, while Vigilance grants 8 block and enters Calm. Your starting relic is Pure Water, which grants another card, Miracle. This, at the start of each combat encounter, costs nothing, but grants 1 bonus energy. Miracle is automatically retained at the end of each turn, but is exhausted on use.

Retain Deck

This kind of build requires plenty of patience: it build up to an extremely powerful attack that aims to sweep your opponents aside in one. Naturally it relies heavily on Retain cards, but also on Establishment, a Power that reduces the cost of a card by 1 each time it’s retained.

Offensively Retain decks benefit most from Windmill Strike, which gains 4 damage every time it’s retained. If you can hold a sufficient amount for long enough, they’ll not only be free, but also capable of dealing huge damage, especially when you’re in Wrath. More importantly however, you’ll need cards that'll keep you alive long enough for this deck to ramp up in power. Perseverance and Protect are key to this, with the former's effectiveness over time being particularly helpful. 

Retain also requires the ability to swap between stances quickly. While Eruption and Vigilance are helpful for this, Crescendo and Tranquility are useful alternatives. You’ll also want plenty of draw, for which Scrawl is likely to be a crucial card: it'll help fill your hand with important cards.

Mantra Deck

While Wrath and Calm are the most common stances, Divinity shouldn’t be overlooked. Like Wrath, it allows for increased damage output, but it’s less risky and provides bonus energy. Entering Divinity costs 10 Mantra, and the aim of this deck is to gain this resource as often as possible, to help you quickly enter Divinity without suffering the risk attached to Blasphemy.

Only four cards provide Mantra. Devotion is a Power card that gives you 2 every turn, which makes it an integral part of the deck and extremely useful if you’re able to upgrade it or play multiple copies of it. Prostrate only provides 2 Mantra, but costs nothing and also provides a small amount of Block. Pray provides 3, as well as Insight, a 0-cost card which lets you to draw extra cards. Worship is a little more expensive, but provides 5 Mantra. One more card, Brilliance, interacts with Mantra, dealing increased damage depending on the amount acquired during battle, which offers a potent offensive solution. Equally Damaru is a useful relic, as it provides 1 Mantra per turn.

None of these cards are particularly good on their own (with the possible exception of Brilliance), which makes Mantra decks something you’ll likely want to pivot to over time, rather than something to commit to at the start of a run. If you go with it, get a good amount of Block and Draw cards, but don’t forget that you’ll also need offensive cards to exploit Divinity’s damage buff. With any luck, you won’t need to rely on Wrath at all, so using Calm cards is a better early game strategy. 

Whichever deck you choose, Slay the Spire's The Watcher benefits from a few key relics. Anything that provides extra energy, like Ice Cream, Happy Flower, or Gremlin Horn helps pull off those important offensive turns. If you’re using many cards at once, relics like Shuriken and Ornamental Fan shouldn’t be overlooked. Damage reduction or Block relics like Orichalcum and Fossilized Helix should help stall, especially if you’re going for longer-term strategies.

Slay the Spire just got bigger with the official roll out of patch 2.0, which finally adds a new character, the Watcher, after months of beta testing. New relics and potions have also been added, in addition to a new Potion Lab.

The Watcher has been in testing since September, and naturally has her own cards and relics. According to Fraser writing last year she's "a blind ascetic who is paying the Spire a visit so she can 'evaluate' it". She's fond of miracles and peeping at cards in her draw pile.

A long list of balance changes are recorded over on the Steam community blog, and there's a bunch of quality of life improvements and bug fixes to look forward to. Modding support has been "improved", though it may cause conflicts for mods designed for version 1.1 - if you're a modder, it may be time to update.

Finally, there's a new Potion Lab, providing an easy-to-access resource on all spells available in the game. Which there are a lot of: this patch alone adds an addition 14.

Check out the full patch notes here. Evan loved Slay the Spire, writing in his review that it's "a strategically deep deckbuilder that, with any luck, has spawned a brilliant new subgenre". It won our 2019 award for Best Design.

Turn-based roguelike Slay the Spire wins our Best Design award for 2019 thanks to the many revelations offered by its intricate deckbuilding. We'll be updating our GOTY 2019 hub with new awards and personal picks throughout December.

Evan: Walking in the footsteps of other PC Gamer GOTYs of yore (Into the Breach, FTL, Spelunky), Slay the Spire is a series of difficult, pleasant epiphanies that you acquire through failure. Oh, relics might be more important than cards. And huh, maybe removing cards is just as important as adding them. I'm starting to think block is more important than damage. Wait, this boss isn't the real end boss? A lot is owed to how transparent Slay the Spire makes information and enemy intents, which stacks some certainty into each shuffle. 

Tyler: I love that it's not just about getting to the last fight. You have to be godlike enough to live through it. I take a lot of risks during each run, because I know it's all for nothing if I limp up to the final boss (the real final boss) with anything less than combos that make angels weep. Every decision I make is about that final encounter. I'll take on an early boss fight with 15 HP to my name if I don't think healing is the right thing to do in the long run, and the delayed gratification when high risk choices I made floors earlier pay off is sweeter for the wait.

Wes: That feeling when, after stacking buff after buff, you channel an entire maxed out arsenal of lightning orbs as Defect, and watch the bolts smash down one at a time for a boss's entire health bar. Damn, it feels so good.

Evan: I think there's two things at work there, Wes: the lively, concussive sound design of those lightning strikes, ice avalanches, a dozen overlapping knife pokes, or, my personal favorite, poison canisters that bounce like a sing-along ball between enemies, dousing them in toxin. But secondly: for how many games are about power accumulation, surprisingly few manage to allow you to achieve that feeling of outsmarting the game's systems. Slay the Spire invites you to beat it by breaking it. Sometimes this means stumbling on an infinitely-looping build, like pairing Unceasing Top ("Whenever you have no cards in hand, draw a card") with cards that allow you to discard your hand. Evident in the whole experience is the depth of understanding that the game's designers have for the deckbuilding and roguelike genres. It isn't a coincidence that one of these designers, Anthony Giovannetti, runs the largest Netrunner fansite on the internet.

Wes: I still haven't managed to beat the true final boss, though I've gotten quite close more than once. I think my weakness in games like this is taking too many cards, as I see the potential in a dozen different card combinations stretch out before me. Focusing makes all the difference. But I really admire how many viable ways there are to build each character once you throw in relics and the randomness of a run. My only real criticism is that some playstyles work splendidly until you run up against that one enemy or boss that is all but immune, ending two hours of build-up in an instant. I admit this may actually say more about my decks than the game itself.

Chris: Speaking as someone who doesn't typically play card games, I'm so impressed at how easy it is for a complete newbie like me to grasp the essentials and immediately start having fun—while also getting a sense of the depth of the design. Slay the Spire is also incredibly mod friendly which means players have been adding characters, cards, and even entirely new rulesets, making it even more replayable than it already is.

Evan: And even if you never touch that stuff, the main mode of play is plenty to chew on. After beating it with all three archetypes, I felt like I'd earned genuine merit badges—I couldn't wait to pin them to my Steam profile. It feels special to be one of only 5.3% of players to earn "The End?"

Before Slay the Spire even left Early Access, it was already a hit. And it’s easy to see why—Mega Crit Games crafted an engrossing and exciting deck builder and roguelike dungeon crawler that’s immediately accessible to new players yet has the depth to satisfy card game veterans. The blend of genres matched with elegant and satisfying deck-building possibilities makes Slay the Spire an almost infinitely replayable experience. 

But why stop at infinite when you go even further? Modders have been busy adding new characters, cards, relics, potions, and even completely new rulesets to Slay the Spire, and mods run the gamut with everything from poker rules to Sailor Moon to playable monsters to farming. Yes, you can really play Slay the Spire as a farmer. Thanks to the Steam Workshop, mod installation is done with the simple click of a button, so there’s no excuse not to try some of these next time you play. (Unless, of course, you’re playing on Xbox Game Pass, which unfortunately doesn’t offer mod support.)

He slimed me

Download: Steam Workshop

There are a lot of cool character mods, many of them coming from unexpected inspirations. For example, one of my least-favourite enemies in Slay the Spire are slimes. When you’ve taken them below half-health, they split, and each of the two slime-halves have the same health as the original before it divided. Knock down their health and they’ll split again, redoubling the amount of slimes you have to face. It’s not always terrible—forcing a Slime Boss to split before he unleashes his slam attack will save you from the immense damage. But typically, having an enemy dividing into a bunch of copies of itself can make for a long, drawn-out fight. 

What’s great about the Slimebound mod is it gives you the chance to play as a slime yourself. Your rogue blob has decided to not simply sit and wait for adventurers to wander in. Instead it wants to conquer the Spire for itself. Your slime character can build a deck with the same powers the slime enemies have, from goop sprays to corrosive spit, and even the fearsome slime crush. And yes, you can split just like an enemy slime does, giving you multiple characters to fight and defend with. You can even find additional gooey friends and add them to your team, and at the end of a round you can re-absorb them to boost your health. There are 75 new cards added and lots of enjoyable original art in the Slimebound mod, and it’s so well made it feels like it could easily be a part of the original game. 

Slimes aren’t the only Slay the Spire monsters you can play as. The Playable Snecko mod lets you crawl through the dungeons as, well, the Snecko, one of Slay the Spire’s act 2 monsters. If you’ve faced one before, you know it uses Perplexing Gaze, which causes confusion—the effect that randomises the cost of cards in your deck. When you play as the Snecko you begin with a relic which confers permanent confusion. Never knowing how much a card will cost adds a bit more RNG to the already heaping mounds of RNG in Slay the Spire, making it a fun and incredibly tricky way to play. 

Playble Snecko also gives you a Snecko Soul relic that adds six unknown, transforming cards to your deck, meaning your hand will be full of surprises in every round of combat. It’s a great mod and a good way to shake up your game. 

If you want a familiar face—or at least a familiar mask—in your next round, The Bug Knight mod should delight you. It adds the character from the outstanding metroidvania Hollow Knight as a playable class, and close to a hundred beautifully illustrated and well-designed cards. The Bug Knight has its own custom resources, called Soul and Void, and your knight might even change appearance if you build some specialised decks, which is just a brilliant touch as well.

Poker face

Download: Steam Workshop

If you’re a fan of another type of card game, you’ll enjoy The Poker Player mod. This mod doesn’t just add a new hero, cards, and relics, but an entirely new ruleset governed by the immutable laws of poker. The Poker Player adds 40 standard playing cards with suits (clubs, spades, hearts, and diamonds) and ranks (one to ten). 

Rather than trying to use your best cards in any given round as in vanilla Slay the Spire, you’re trying to save them up to create poker hands. You play your best poker hand at the end of your turn, all at once, which is called the Showdown. 

The poker hands are ranked—pair, two pair, three of a kind, straight (sequential cards), flush (all cards of the same suit), full house, four of a kind, and straight flush. Each poker card costs one energy, so you can discard the ones you don’t want, which are replaced with fresh cards until you’ve run out of energy—or if you’ve been dealt a good hand, you can skip straight to the Showdown. There’s strategy, too, because each suit has a specific buff: diamonds will deal damage to the enemy with the least amount of HP, for example, and spades give you points to your block. Cards are upgradable, too, so you can turn a four of clubs into a five of clubs if you haven’t found one yet. 

Many of the vanilla Slay the Spire cards are deactivated when you use The Poker Player mod, which feels weird until you realise they’d just get in the way, taking up room in your deck and preventing you from putting together an effective five-card poker hand. But there are custom specialty cards added, too, like those that let you draw cards of a certain suit or peek at your deck to see what’s coming next. If you love poker and deck builders, this is a creatively made and extremely fun mod to try.

Growing cards

Download: Steam Workshop

As you’d expect there are plenty of anime mods—The Senshi mod adds Sailor Moon to the mix, for example—but it’s hard to look through the Steam Workshop and not find yourself curious about a mod that adds a farming system. I’m not sure why a farmer would try to conquer the Spire, but just because he’s got a pitchfork instead of a sword and overalls instead of armour doesn’t mean he can’t try. The Hayseed mod adds a character whose abilities centre around planting and cultivating crops. You’ll plant different crops like potatoes and squash—they’ll hover around your head like The Defect’s orbs—and once they’ve matured you can harvest them for different effects. The Hayseed mod even brings seasons to Slay the Spire, which can result in different types of crops and seasonal events. The custom card artwork, along with the overall concept, is exceptionally creative. 

And even if you’re not looking for wild, drastic changes like farming and poker, there are still mods that add new options while letting you retain the essence of vanilla Slay the Spire. Replay the Spire doesn’t alter the rules or make you grow vegetables, but it does add tons of new stuff on top of the existing game, including over 70 custom cards, more than 60 new relics, plus additional rooms, bosses, and events. It’s bursting with fresh surprises for your next few hundred runs, and it’s got a sharp sense of humour with custom relics like baseballs, lightbulbs, and even anti-virus software. 

And just for fun, why not throw in the occasional treasure chest that may decide to take a bite out of you when you open its lid? Mimic Mod turns those treasure rooms and question marks on the map into a random chance for danger, because you may discover a chest full of loot is in fact a ravenous monster. It’s an additional challenge, sure, but mimics feel right at home in the dungeons of Slay the Spire. There’s even a new Mad Mimicry card to use against them, which lets you duplicate a random card in your hand. Hope it’s a good one. You’ll need it.

Head to the Steam Workshop to find any of the mods I’ve listed—just type their names into the search bar and they’ll pop up for you to subscribe to, as long as you’re logged in. To get these mods running you’ll also need to install a couple of utilities—don’t worry, though, they’re a snap. The first is Basemod, an open-source API that adds a dev console and new cards, relics, monsters, and characters to be added. The second utility is ModTheSpire, which is a mod loader—when you play Slay the Spire with mods, you’ll just need to tick the box next to the mod you want to use, and untick any you’d like to disable. Luckily, you can simply subscribe to both of these utilities in the Steam Workshop, and the next time you start the game, they’ll be ready and waiting.

With only three characters, Slay the Spire is a meaty deckbuilding roguelike that I've still not been able to defeat, and now it's poised to introduce another hero to its roster. The Watcher isn't in the live game yet, but is now available in the beta branch along with an update that introduces new relics, bug fixes, balance tweaks and more. 

If you opt into the beta branch through Steam, you'll get access to The Watcher as soon as you hop into the game, but only if you've beaten the game and unlocked the Defect character. If you meet the prerequisites, you'll be able to start a new game with the purple mystic. 

The Watcher is a blind ascetic who is paying the Spire a visit so she can 'evaluate' it. She's got monk vibes and can switch between different fighting stances that give her helpful bonuses. She starts every battle with a new Miracle, and being a bit on the mystical side she's got scrying powers that let you look at cards in your draw pile. Handy! 

If you want to do a bit of preparing before taking the Watcher for a spin for the first time, Mega Crit Games hasn't revealed any details yet, but you can still find lists that cover the character's abilities, as well as the new cards and relics, like this one from Kehvedna on Reddit.  

Mega Crit also announced that physical console editions are now available for preorder, along with a special vinyl edition of the Slay the Spire soundtrack.

Rogue-like deck builder Slay the Spire, one of the best games of the year so far, and Early Access multiplayer shooter Squad are the two early unlocks for the latest Humble Monthly Bundle, and you can grab them both right now for $12. Considering Slay the Spire's lowest-ever price is around $10 and Squad's is around $18, you're saving a pretty penny, here.

Slay the Spire is the kind of game everyone should play, even if you don't like deck builders. As Evan wrote in his review, it's one of "the most elegantly designed games in recent memory", and has basically spawned its own genre. Even with its current 50% Steam sale, $12 is the cheapest you can get it right now.

Squad isn't as big a home run, but it's still intriguing. It's a slow-paced 40v40 shooter with maps modeled after Afghanistan and Iraq, and it entered alpha way back in 2014. In 2017, it made our list of the best multiplayer FPSs you probably aren't playing, and it's gotten plenty of meaty updates since then, including tutorials and modding tools. 

You can buy both games for $12 right now on the Humble Bundle site, and you'll also get a cache of mystery games that unlock in a month's time. The money actually buys you a month-to-month subscription, but you can cancel anytime, or just pause your subscription if you don't fancy any given month.

When I was a kid, Sailor Moon was my jam. Do you know what's also my jam? This super cool Sailor Moon-themed Slay the Spire mod that adds her as a playable character, along with 75 new cards and 20 new relics. This isn't just a one-dimensional reskin: Creators Aelie and KumaGorath have created some entirely new mechanics to learn, too. It's all very impressive.

Though I'm far from a Slay the Spire pro, I've taken this mod for a run and was surprised by how comprehensive it is. The modders created a fully animated Sailor Moon avatar, and well over half of her cards have unique animations when cast. But what's really cool is how Sailor Moon plays compared to Slay the Spire's main cast.

Unlike normal Slay the Spire characters that have a few core features (like Defect's orbs), Sailor Moon has a bunch of different keywords and mechanics you have to keep track of. Her most basic stat is Magic, which increases the damage dealt by Magical cards up to a certain limit. In order to max your Magic stat, though, you'll need to periodically play Transformation cards which increases your Magic Capacity.

One little touch I like a lot is Teamwork cards, which have combo effects when played after using certain cards. All of these are themed like the other Sailor Scouts, and when using one they'll temporarily join you on the battlefield to cast their spell.

It's a lot to take in and, like with any new StS character, I'm struggling to connect the dots on how to best draft new cards and make a viable build. I'm not sure how well balanced all of this is, but I'm having fun just tinkering around with the all the bright, colorful spells and imagining poor Sailor Moon having to run an endless gauntlet of card-based horrors.

You can download the mod from the Steam Workshop (be sure to download the other required mods, too). 

I've never been much into card games on PC, unless you count poker—which is why when a fantasy card game has some poker in it I tend to pounce. I played We Slay Monsters last year, a turn-based RPG built around poker hands, but more recently I starting using The Poker Player mod for Slay the Spire.

The Poker Player mod adds a new character, who unfortunately doesn't have any custom art so it just looks like the Ironclad. But where the mod lacks art it makes up for with a fun twist on Slay the Spire. It adds 40 playing cards with suits (clubs, diamonds, aces, and hearts) and ranks (1-10). There are also a bunch of new specialty cards built around the poker systems, and new relics to enhance your play.

The general idea is that you're trying to build the best poker hand—pair, two pair, three of a kind, straight, flush, full house, four of a kind, straight flush. The fun thing about the mod is that your poker hand gets played at the end of your turn: the showdown. So rather than trying to do damage, add block, and use buffs during your turn, you mostly do it at the very end when your hand is put together. It's a fun twist on standard Slay the Spire, and takes some getting used to.

Your poker cards each cost one energy, and you can discard them in exchange for a new one from your draw pile until you're out of energy. (Or if you've put together a good hand you can end your turn early.) Each suit also does something specific: clubs deal damage to all enemies, diamonds do damage to the enemy with the lowest HP, spades give you block, and hearts (cleverly) heal your own HP. These effects are boosted by how good your poker hand is when you've reached the showdown at the end of your turn. So in addition to trying to build a good poker hand, you're trying to build a hand in the suit that benefits you most depending on your current monster situation.

It can get tricky at times. You can still find a few standard cards when adding to your deck, but they kind of get in the way of your poker hands since when you use them you wind up with fewer than five cards in the showdown. And when you're fighting enemies that add cards to your deck (like slimed or dazed) and your deck fills up with those extra cards, it can be hard putting together anything besides a pair or three of a kind. But that's the challenge, and it's fun. (You are protected from the first six status cards added to your deck thanks to the default poker relic, but six is never enough, is it?)

There are some nice zero-cost cards added by the mod that let you discard unwanted cards or peek at your draw pile to see what's next or add a few extra cards of a certain suit. And you can upgrade your poker cards just like you can standard cards—so if you're not making enough straights you can craft a six out of an extra five, and so on.

As you might guess there are number of vanilla cards, potions, and relics that the mod restricts you from using because they'd really muck things up (like Runic Pyramid, which lets you keep cards at the end of your turn, and the Swift potion, which lets you draw three cards). Even some events have been modified to fit the poker theme.

I do wish the art in the mod was better, but The Poker Player has been very well thought out and I'd recommend it to poker lovers and anyone who is looking for a new twist on Slay the Spire—it really lets you approach the game differently. You can subscribe to The Poker Player in the Steam Workshop here, and you'll also need these three base mods: Basemod, StsLib, and Mod The Spire.

I thought I had finally won roguelike deck-builder Slay The Spire. In building my Silent deck I focused on card draw and energy production, which allowed me to generate near-infinite loops that, even if ended by a bad draw, generated so much block that nothing could touch me. 

I was strong as hell. There's a regular enemy in the third act with 999 health, and you don't have to actually beat it, just outlast it, because it dies on its own after a set number of turns. With this deck, I felt confident I could've killed it even without the timer. Nothing could stop me.

And then I got stomped by the final boss. Just wrecked.

My deck contained too many useless cards that created the potential for what happened: drawing the worst possible hands at the worst possible moments. It was unrefined, and missing some key components that would've given me a truly infinite loop. It was a great deck until it was terrible. (Alas, I didn't screenshot it at the time and it'd take forever to find it among my other runs, but it's nothing unbelievable.) 

One of the many brilliant things about Slay the Spire is how often it's possible to reach the end, whether or not I'm strong enough to beat the bosses. I can take easy routes, hitting events and rest sites and merchants and avoiding elite enemies, build a decent deck, feel good, and then stare down 60-or-whatever incoming damage with a hand that can do nothing about it and realize my deck is complete trash.

This is evidenced by the achievements. 60.3 percent of players have beaten The Shapes, the boss that appears at the end of the third act, but far fewer have reached and completed the ending beyond that. Many arrive, few survive.

I love that about Slay the Spire. I'm often turned off by roguelikes because, heck, I don't want to play the opening level or act or section 100 times to learn how to handle whatever's after it. I could never get into Spelunky for that reason, although I respect that its design clicks for others. (We gave it one of our highest review scores ever.)

What makes Slay the Spire different to me is that I don't start a new run thinking, 'Can I reach the end this time?' I know I can reach the end. The question is, 'When I reach the end, will I be a god?'

To that end, plenty of my runs do end in the first or second act, because you don't become a god without taking risks. Sometimes, I start building a deck that I know will be weak until I find the right card, and just don't find it before eating dirt. Other times, I die because I targeted elite enemies too aggressively, hoping for a key relic drop (if you haven't played, relics are items with passive effects that can completely change the deck you build).

Dying can be frustrating in Slay the Spire, but these are calculated deaths, and that softens them a lot. I'd rather not reach the end of the game if I'm not going to be strong enough to win it all—or at least have a chance—so really it's better if I die early when things aren't panning out. Rarely in a game have I died and thought, "Well, this is for the best." That's part of what makes Slay the Spire so hard to put down. 

And, generally, that's just one of the reasons Slay the Spire is currently my favorite game of the year—Evan nicely encapsulates many other reasons in his review. 

If you haven't picked it up, Slay the Spire is on Steam. If you're not into card games or roguelikes, this is the game to change your mind.

The joy of a singleplayer card game like Slay the Spire is that it puts absolutely broken combos within your grasp. It feels good to deal 50 poison damage to something. But it feels even better when you drop a series of cards that sextuples that amount of poison, kills an enemy, and triggers a corpse explosion that cascades splash damage to all of the other things that are trying to kill you.

Slay the Spire is zeroed-in on this feeling of linking cards together to produce avalanches of damage, defense, or utility. Plenty of games put this domino-effect sensation at the center of their gameplay loop, like when you collect enough Diablo gear to unlock some obscene damage multiplier, or when you Call enough Duty to temporarily become a helicopter. Slay the Spire's achievement is the way it makes this feeling of power simultaneously so potent and elusive.

This is an intricately designed deckbuilding game grounded in deliberate balance, populated by confounding enemies, steady rewards, and tactile decks of cards that play like efficient, beautiful machines of your own creation.

VIDEO: Slay the Spire's Custom mode includes an 'Endless' ruleset, where you can see how far your favorite combos carry you.

Trinity 

Slay the Spire splits its 283 cards into three siloed archetypes (The Ironclad, The Silent, and The Defect), characters that are as asymmetrical as StarCraft's Terran, Protoss, and Zerg. But the fantasy monsters that stand between you and the top of the spire don't play cards of their own. Instead, they fight sort of like Pokémon, inflicting damage, pesky status effects, or buffing themselves each turn. These actions are telegraphed in advance by UI and, like our most recent Game of the Year, provide near-perfect information. The good outcome of this design is that I never feel cheated when I die, rare for a roguelike or card game, let alone one that intersects the two.

Over wins and losses, you start to see the way small decisions pile up into larger outcomes. I could usually trace a defeat back to a moment of greed, a hurried misplay, or an ill-advised card pickup. Slay the Spire isn't Magic: The Gathering or Hearthstone, but a good thing it has in common with those competitive games is that it makes adding any one card to your deck a non-trivial decision. There's enough margin for error given, but I've doomed dozens of runs just by picking a couple bad cards. Luckily the epiphanies that result from my own failure are gratifying, with each discovery uncovering some unnoticed layer of depth. 

The Defect, Slay the Spire's robotic character, for example, starts each run with a relic that summons a lightning orb, one of four, elemental energies that can occupy vacant slots encircling The Defect. To my naive eyes, this character was about lightning, and my initial runs were spent hoovering up as many cards as I could that made lightning orbs. I'd always grab multiple copies of Storm, a power card that summons a lightning orb whenever I played another power card. Free lightning! It felt great to end each turn and watch my family of floating green balls dish out randomly-targeted zaps. 

This build would sometimes push me into Slay the Spire's third act, but eventually it'd get my robot face kicked in by the first monster that dished out big, turn-one damage. However much lightning I filled my deck with, it'd still take three or four turns to bring it out, and by then, I'd be dead.

Simply knowing Slay the Spire's combos or best cards isn't enough to earn a win. Your willingness to abandon your sweet deck idea when the RNG isn't serving up, say, loads of lightning orb cards for the Defect is itself a skill. You're building an airplane as you fly it, from partially randomized parts, through an FTL-style web of varied encounters and events. 

Which path you take up the spire is a fun test of your ability to weigh long-term goals against short-term needs. Like the decisions you make deckbuilding, learning when to detour is a skill, and different strategies are viable. 

The moment an act's map procedurally generates, I'm eyeballing which route takes me past the most campfires, rest points where I can either permanently upgrade a card or heal. But in earlier acts, I also want to fight as many Elite enemies as I can, which drop relics—unique equipment that contributes crucial buffs or triggers like "Whenever you discard, gain 3 block." Some of the best runs have been when I make the tough decision to fight a bunch of enemies in order to reach a merchant, just for the potential payoff of buying an essential card that might be there. 

Random events also line the path, and while some pose interesting choices (like whether to halve your max HP in exchange for vampirism), my complaint is that some of the events have clearer-cut good and bad choices. I'd also love to see a few extremely rare events, something that produces that one-in-a-thousand feeling I get when The Mysterious Stranger shows up in Fallout.

Card fu

A little remarkably, there are moments when Slay the Spire feels like a turn-based fighting game. The audio does most of this work, serving up expressive sounds that convey motion and impact in addition to training your brain on fine details like status effect triggers. The glacial crunch when my Defect drops multiple frost orbs is ear candy. Ditto the quintuple-tap thud of the Silent's Flechettes against a lifebar, or the toxic clink of Bouncing Flask as it spills poison over random enemies.

One deck type for The Silent became one of my favorites because of the sound it made. This 'death by a thousand cuts' build is all about playing as many 0-cost attack cards as possible in order to accumulate absurd strength and defense bonuses through relics. Over four or five combat rounds, your pinpricks transform into gouging, 40-damage swings. When this deck is in full motion, it's a chorus of stacking steel as a dozen shivs leave your hand as quickly as they enter.

Slay the Spire's playful fantasy art, on the other hand, contributes less to the joy of its combat. Enemies don't animate a whole lot, and as I battled these monsters again and again I found myself exclusively looking at the cards in my hand rather than taking in the fight. Darkest Dungeon remains the pinnacle of this style of art for its skull-rattling 2D combat camerawork, and Slay the Spire might've benefited from this kind of cinematic flare.

One other poke I'd make: I don't love that blocking damage feels so central to victory. Tracking down the relics and cards to create ample defense is by no means automatic, but there simply aren't many monsters or bosses that can crack a 100-HP barrier that persists over each turn. Across all three characters, loading up on block was the common thread in my wins.

Still, this seems trivial compared to the genre-bending achievement that Slay the Spire represents. At every stage of my own mastery over the Spire's tricks and hazards, meaningful difficulty kept in lockstep. When I beat the game with The Defect's orb-fu, I had to unlearn some of that strategy and wrap my head around the direct damage style of The Ironclad. When losses piled up, a custom mode was waiting for me with a literal checklist of absurd mutators that let me make my own rules, like running a deck with all-rare cards, or trying to win with 1 HP. When I beat everything, I had to beat it all over again, and complete the unlocked, secret final act.

The essence of what makes a great card game is readily available here: the joy of building a machine and optimizing it as much as you can. As is the bottomless surprise, the highs and lows of roguelikes. If that isn't enough, recently added moddability is already adding new decks, enemies, and cards to tinker with.