Slay the Spire: The Board Game

I’m skeptical by default of anything riding hype off a video game, and I went into this one expecting the usual thin cardboard reskin. It’s not that. The way they compressed health totals and energy costs down for tabletop arithmetic actually preserves what made the digital game click, and the deck you build still has that same feeling of an engine clicking into place a run or two before it kills you. Compared against the upkeep of other coop deckbuilders on my shelf, this sits closer to Marvel Champions than the genuinely fiddly end of the genre, and it teaches faster than either Marvel Champions or Spirit Island in my experience.

Teardown is where this one asks more of you than most games its size, separating each player’s deck back out, un sleeving and re sleeving if you’ve gone that route, it’s a real chunk of time compared to just boxing up a euro. The organization inside the box makes it manageable rather than a chore, but budget the extra fifteen minutes on either end of a session.

Difficulty is brutal by act two and three, and that’s by design, this is a roguelike, you’re meant to die, learn what killed you, and come back better prepared next run. My table took four full runs before we finally beat it, and the moment we did was a genuine stand up and high five kind of night, which is rare enough at my table that it’s worth mentioning. Snack compatibility during play is fine, nothing delicate to knock over, though a spilled drink on the layout of monster rows would be a real setback given how much bookkeeping each row already needs.

Price is the honest sticking point, this is not a cheap box, and if you’ve already sunk hours into the PC version for a fraction of the cost, that math is going to bother some people more than others. For what it is though, I’d play this again tonight.