Slay the Spire: The Board Game

Slay the Spire on my phone has stolen more than a few evenings, either because I needed to finish one more run or because a bad loss had left me too annoyed to sleep. So when the board game was announced, I gave it a quiet “good luck with that” and moved on. That was a miss: we put it on the table with three players almost immediately, and it turned out to be a much stronger adaptation than I had expected.

Its familiar run structure has been brought across as a cooperative game. Some cards and mechanisms have been simplified, and some are absent, but the remaining shape works: you move through the run together, talk through your options, and try not to hand the game the one opening that wrecks the whole journey.

Each run is fairly short, which matters when three people are meant to make decisions together rather than wait for one another. Damage, healing, and health are handled in rounded tens, so nobody’s brain turns into a saucepan of arithmetic; the attention stays on strategy and cooperation. Three players feels especially right. One person will argue for safety, another will push the risk, and suddenly everyone has to live with the choice.

It will not replace the two or three hundred hours many people have already given to Slay the Spire on mobile or PC, and it does not need to. This is a very good, clean cooperative version of it, with three players at its sweet spot, and it should give its owners many happy hours at the table. Not bad for a game I had initially written off.