malvasia bianca

The original Slay the Spire is a great game. When the Kickstarter launched for a board game version of the game, it had been two or three years since I’d played the video game version; that was recent enough that I still remembered the game fondly but enough time had passed that I didn’t mind having an excuse to grapple with it again in a different format. And I was curious what would change in the translation; also, they added a co-op mode, which I figured I could play with my coworkers. As board games go, it wasn’t cheap, but still, I figured that I’d played the original enough that, even if I completely bounced off of the board game version, I’d still have spent less than a buck per hour that I’d played the two versions combined, which seemed fair.

It showed up a year and a half later. Unfortunately, by then, most of my board game playing coworkers had left the company, so playing it at the office wasn’t going to happen. So I played it at home; I got into rhythm of playing one act three days a week, so I’d finish a game per week if it went well, or I’d have a few tries if it didn’t.

And it was a really good adaptation! It had been maybe four years since I’d played the original, so I couldn’t have told you what the differences were: they’d clearly shrunk the health values significantly, and some of the minor mechanics that I remembered from the original weren’t there (e.g. plated armor was nowhere to be found), but, honestly, it felt just the same emotionally. The one big difference was the pervasive use of dice: you roll a die each combat round, and that affects some of the enemy’s action choices and whether or not some of your relics fire. (I haven’t thought hard about the reasoning for the latter, but I assume it’s because, with the smaller health values, relics that fired every turn would be a lot more powerful.) And it was fun being in charge of the mechanics myself instead of having a computer do it, and it was fun starting over from the beginning, with no cards unlocked and with no ascension levels, and then start to work my way up.

It did, of course, take longer with me running the mechanics: about an hour per act instead of about an hour for a full run. The designers were aware of this, though, and so they set up the box in a way that made it easy to save your game state at the end of an act. I would have played the game a lot less if they hadn’t done that, because finding a three-hour chunk would be something I would have to think twice about, whereas finding multiple one-hour chunks wasn’t so bad.

I kept that up for several months. Getting my skills back up to speed, getting better at running the mechanics physically, learning some of the corners in the rules and places where I hadn’t quite been playing correctly, continuing to find the Defect and the Silent super fun when they’ve got their machinery all humming and continuing to find the Watcher much harder than any of the other three. And the major archetypes within those characters (e.g. poison or shivs for the Silent) were all there. The ascensions made me hone my skill, I was surprised how powerful the retain archetype for the Watcher was, I was happy to have bought the game.

And, even though I wasn’t able to play the multiplayer regularly, I did have a friend over one weekend to try it out. That worked quite well, and it was (unsurprisingly) the one aspect of the board game that had a bit of a different feel from the computer game. All the players can attack any of the enemies; most of your cards and relics affect their owner, but sometimes they can affect other players. So, for the first few rounds of a battle, there’s some jockeying around where we try to work together in a way that minimizes the damage that any of us are taking; but then, as enemies start falling, the players with those enemies start being able to devote more and more time to offense, and then, quite suddenly, we’ve blasted all of the enemies off the board.

It also showed another way in which they designed the game well to acknowledge the fact that the game is a little long but is divided into acts. My wife hadn’t played the computer game, so she didn’t take part in that session at first; but it sounded interesting enough to here that she started watching. So she decided to join us for Act 2; I handed the deck I’d been playing to her so she didn’t have to learn a whole new character in a new game, and then I grabbed another character and went through the table at the end of the rulebook to bring that character up to an average character at the start of Act 2. (Add in this many cards, this many relics, this much money, roll a die a few times to put in some more randomness, etc.) And that worked great; and it would also have worked just as well if we’d started with 3 players but then one of us had had to drop out partway through. (I was going to say at the end of an act, but dropping out in the middle of an act would have been just fine too.)

I thouroughly enjoyed the game for several months. But also, at some point, I felt like I’d seen enough of the board game version to have a good feel for how it worked; and, while I was quite glad I played it, I also didn’t think it actively added anything to the video game version other than the ability to play multiplayer. And that three hours a week was noticeable; if I want to spend that much time playing Slay the Spire, why not play the video game version and be able to finish more games, and also to be able to pick it up and put it down in the middle of an act?

So I finished the ascension that I was on. (Ascension 2, I guess; I was going through each ascension with all characters, and the Watcher took a while!) I still was curious about multiplayer, so I brought my copy to a local board game meetup; we got a four player game going (me, two people who had played the video game but not the board game, and one person who was entirely new to it), and we all had a great time and made it through all three acts. (I figured I’d keep it easy so I didn’t bring out the components for Act 4 in that session, but rest assured, they’re there!) And that was the end of my time with the game; I’d be happy to bring it out again if people want to play it multiplayer, but I don’t expect I’ll return to it myself any time soon.

Or rather, that was the end of my time with the board game. Because I restarted the video game; not completely restarted, I left stuff unlocked, but I went back down to Ascension 0 and I’m making my way back up through the Ascensions with all of the characters. And, indeed, it’s much faster; I’m in the middle of Ascension 7 now, even though I’ve spent less calendar time with the video game version during this stretch than I had with the board game version.

And it’s funny to see how many differences there are! Most of them are small, but the video game version has lots of cards with one-off effects that they didn’t bring over to the board game. There are only three status effects in the board game, and they’ve designed the monster/card pool such that two of those status effects can never be present in the same battle. The way the Watcher’s wrath stance works is noticeably different in the two versions. You can’t raise your max HP in the board game, but that’s a decently important mechanic in the video game. And, like I said, the numbers are much larger in the video game and the relics aren’t probabilistic.

But also: each act is much bigger! I’d been assuming that the acts had the same number of nodes (at least the same height, maybe less wide), it’s just that it takes three times as long to play if you’re going through it on the board game. But nope, the video game has maybe twice as many standard enemies and half again as many elites in each act, and it’s got more chests on it (on the board game you get one chest in Act 1 and none in the other two).

So: very good board game; I’m not going to actively recommend that people buy it, because the video game removes so much friction, but if you’re a big fan of the video game and want to try a different spin on it, then you’ll be happy with the board game. (Especially if you’ve got the time to play it and friends to play it with.) And also, I’m happy to have been nudged back to playing the video game version: it really is an excellent game, and there’s something rewarding about refining my feel for how to iteratively build a nice, tight deck.