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

polygon.com:

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