Day 14: Today's Pick — Slay the Spire

There is a category of games that I think of as "kitchen-table games." They are not flashy. They do not have cinematic cutscenes. They do not require a graphics card the size of a paperback book. You sit down at a kitchen table with one, and an hour later you stand up, slightly dazed, and you have to feed the cat.

Slay the Spire is the king of kitchen-table games.

It came out in early access in 2017, designed by two guys at a tiny studio called Mega Crit, and it took a genre — deck-building card games — that had been mostly the province of dudes with sleeve protectors and folded it into a single-player roguelike that anyone, anyone, can sit down in front of and grasp inside three minutes.

Here is the loop. You pick a character. You start with a small deck of cards. You climb a tower. Each floor you fight monsters, find items, and pick a new card to add to your deck. Sometimes the new card is great. Sometimes the new card is a trap that will, twenty floors later, lose you the run. The decisions are dense and small and constant. The art is hand-drawn. The music is moody guitar plinks. The whole thing is about fifty megabytes, which is roughly the file size of two iPhone photos.

What makes it special — what makes it the kitchen-table-iest of kitchen-table games — is the pacing. A run takes about an hour, give or take. You die a lot. Death is fine. Death is, in fact, the point: each death teaches you something about how cards combo, which relics are worth the curse, when to skip an elite. The game has an unusually generous learning curve in that it gets more interesting the more you understand. After 50 hours you start seeing builds; after 200 you start solving fights as logic puzzles; after 500 you are running Ascension 20 with the Watcher and it still surprises you.

I have, at last count, 612 hours in Slay the Spire. I am not proud, but I am also not ashamed. Almost none of those hours were spent on a couch in front of a television. They happened in fifteen-minute pockets — in airports, in waiting rooms, in bed at the end of a long Tuesday, on a phone on the train. Slay the Spire fits into the cracks of a life. It is the rare game that respects your time so completely it will let you save mid-fight, close the app, walk into a meeting, and pick up exactly where you left off three hours later.

If you have never played a deck-builder, start with the Ironclad. He hits things. The cards do what they say. After two or three runs you'll get the rhythm. Then try the Silent (poison and shivs and frantic card-draw). Then the Defect (orbs!). Then the Watcher, who is technically broken in a fun way and will have you cackling at your screen.

Pricing: $25 on Steam, often discounted to single digits. There is, this year, a sequel in early access — also good, also recommended, but the original is the one I keep coming back to. The original is the perfect size. The original ends. The original does not need anything.

This is the game I'd hand to someone whose definition of "video game" is Tetris. It is also the game I'd hand to someone with a Steam library deeper than my own. It is good for both. That's rare.

Buy it. Play one run. Tell me, the next morning, whether you slept.