Co-op makes Slay the Spire: The Board Game an instant classic

Slay the Spire is such an iconic video game it practically forged a sub genre: the roguelike deck builder. By merging the classic tabletop experience of drafting a deck with wildly rule-altering relics and the ease of a video game handling all the complicated maths, Slay the Spire has inspired a litany of imitators. Now the game has come full circle, back to the realm of the physical, with Slay the Spire: The Board Game. We played the game in our latest episode of Overboard and enjoyed the heck out of it.

It’s fair to ask… why? When the video game is so perfect, why would you want to make the game more cumbersome, with actual shuffling and math to do? The answer is really quite simple: Slay the Spire: The Board Game lets you have the spire slaying experience with your friends.

It’s astounding but totally sensible that Slay the Spire would work as a tabletop game. But it’s notable how elegantly it makes the pivot. It makes all the numbers you’re dealing with smaller, and some combat mechanics are tweaked, but it’s all in the name of making it easier to play with your friends. For example, player turn order is fluid, so you can strategize the best way to distribute your attacks to the monsters on the board. You’re also not limited to attacking the monster in front of you, but any monster on the field. This gives you the chance to defend a fellow player by targeting the monster that wants to attack them, or by making a monster vulnerable only for another to hit them with their biggest attack.

“I never thought about how cool a co-op version of Slay the Spire could be until I played this, but the interplay between the different decks feels so cool that I immediately wanted to play this version forever,” said Simone de Rochefort.

Unlike many cooperative tabletop games, Slay the Spire: The Board Game rarely felt like it suffered from someone taking command. Since each player has a very different deck that they build throughout the game, everyone feels like they have a role to play.

“I think a lot of people who enjoy Slay the Spire have wished for a way to play collaboratively, and the board game fulfills that wish shockingly well,” said Patrick Gill.

“It nails the feel of the game, without making the “dungeon turns” too cumbersome. I think that was what made me fall off of Gloomhaven almost immediately, despite loving the concept. It was not fun to run.”

Critically, the board game preserves so much of what makes Slay the Spire a “just one more match” type of game. Finding new relics is always exciting, upgrading cards is a treat (just flip them over inside the included card protectors), and its a thrill to play new a card that fits right into the engine you’re building.

“I think I’m just amazed they made a board game version of a video game where you spend the majority of your time doing the stuff that you enjoy.” said Gill.

The trickiest part of recommending Slay the Spire: The Board Game comes with the price. Our play through used the $170 collectors edition with metal coins and extra playing mats, but even the regular version sells for around $100. It’s fair to ask if that’s too high for a tabletop game based on a video game that you can get for $25 or less. On the other, for a group of avid Slay the Spire fans, the answer is probably very easy!

You can see for yourself in our let’s play at the top of this post, where we go through Act 2 of our campaign. If you enjoy this video, be sure to check out the rest of Overboard over on our YouTube channel!