Slay the Spire

For folks looking for an enjoyable dungeon-crawl-meets-card-game, I suggest trying out "Slay the Spire." It's still in early-access but is incredibly polished.

The game sees you choosing one of three characters as you fight your way, floor-by-floor through individual enemies, sub-bosses, and level bosses. You collect defensive, power, and attack cards as you continue your fight as well as artifacts that can have powerful impacts on your play style. Each "run" will likely end in your death and you will start all over again with the default set of cards.

It's considered somewhat of a Rogue-like in that you gain "some" abilities that carry over from run to run. But it's not the composition of your deck, but rather what cards and artifacts are available (each occurs randomly) based upon your persistent level.

I've found it to be very difficult, but whimsical and fun. There are different ways to play the characters from defensive to offensive and anywhere in between.

My username on Steam is the same as on here if you care to add a friend to compare you performance on "daily runs" etc.

I've put in about 70 hours to Slay the Spire since I purchased it when it went on sale a month ago. I like it.

At it's core it's quite repetitive, but the gameplay is compelling enough that it's one of those "just one more run" kinds of games (for me).

Yeah. And runs are a little too hit or miss based on what cards and relics come up for you, but it's still fun. I can tell early on whether or not I'll make it to the end of Act 3 based on what relics and cards I get early, but I like it enough to play out the run anyway. It's the kind of game that I spin up and play for thirty to sixty minutes or so to waste some time.

I haven't played enough to figure out the "best" build for each character -- I'd like to believe the developers intend to allow for multiple successful strategies. Trying to make the best out of "the hand you're dealt" is a big part of the challenge, it seems.

Definitely. However, the variant of builds is not as wide or dynamic as people may lead you to believe. I can think of two for Ironman and two or three for Silent. Defect is the most dynamic and most people's favorite for that reason.

I find myself playing Ironman a good bit because it's the most difficult to make work sometimes. Defect is my favorite though.

I finally beat it with Silent last night in my pursuit to level up. I haven't invested enough time in Defect to best figure out a viable strategy. Still working on a good strategy with Ironman.

There are some decent places out there to get a feel for great Ironclad cards and bad Ironclad cards, so I won't rehash that here. I generally try to keep the deck size as low as I can get it. The times I've succeeded with Ironclad, it was really all about the relics that came up on my run. Blood Vial so that I could trade it for Bites without giving up 30% max health. Several max health relics came up, too. Ritual Dagger was also useful.

Defect is the most fun character, to me, because almost any run can be a successful one. It's much more dependent on your choices than the other two, especially compared to Ironclad. I've succeeded with Defect more than the other two. So many useful ways to go about deck building with Defect. You're much less likely to have runs completely shut down by random chance while playing Defect.

One quick tip for Defect that I wish I had known earlier - find the balance between focus and extra orb slots that works for your play style. I used to think I needed more orb slots all the time. Now I'm finding that I prefer to have more focus and three or four orb slots is probably enough. Though, I did win one with only one Defrag+ and getting to max orb slots. Ten lightning orbs with Electrodynamics meant things died very quickly. Self Repair kept me going between battles.

Thanks for the tips!