Meet My New Math Tutor, Slay the Spire
My name is Daniel, and I love card games. I am absolute garbage at them, but I love the HELL out of those damn geek ass card games.
I grew up playing card games. The Yu-gi-oh and Pokémon TCGs dominated my elementary school life (sorry to my brother David if you’re reading this for trading away your Dark Magician for a Sangan in kindergarten, I definitely got finessed), and in high school I played old man games like poker, Big 2, and Mahjong.
Both of these realms came together through Hearthstone. I played it for a while, and at first I didn’t completely dig it. All of my hyper-obsessive energy was spent on League of Legends, so learning the intricacies of the expansive card library on top of archetypal strategies was out of the picture. I did, however, think that the Arena was super cool. Deck-building was never my strong point in games like Yu-gi-oh because of how large the library was; being forced to make my own deck from a randomized pool and working from the same library as everyone else was both way more accessible and fair.
The unhealthy Pavlovian reward systems of random number generators that make each gaming experience unique get me every time — whether it’s shiny hunting in Pokémon, opening up evil Overwatch lootboxes, or pulling a legendary in Hearthstone’s Arena, I find ways to curb my very dangerous gambling urges through all experiences. Recently, I’ve been hooked on roguelikes, and one of them in particular.
While still in early access, MegaCrit’s Slay the Spire proves to be a fantastic deck-builder-slash-roguelike hybrid with enough depth to warrant the current $18 CAD ($16 USD) price point. It’s really great. Like, super great.
You start off a run by picking one of the two early-access classes, each with their own base set of cards, already-expansive libraries, and unique starting relics (these grant you special abilities like auto-casting a debuff on your enemies or healing you at the end of each combat stage). From there, you work your way up a map stage-by-stage, hitting up standard or mini-boss battles, random events, treasure rooms, campfires (where you can heal or upgrade cards), or boss rooms. Flavour text is lovely all around (especially in the random event rooms), but the battles are where the game shines.
You fight mobs with cards. You fight mobs with cards. Yeah. Each card has a corresponding energy cost, which drains from a pool of a replenishing base 3 per turn. Turns therefore become puzzles in microcosm striving to make the most optimal and value-driven plays.
Disclaimer: I have not done math for a long time, and for a good reason — math sucks! Once you graduate from high school, calculators are really like, the shit. I’ve forgotten like 90% of the formulae and equations that I spent hours grinding out for marks. Slay the Spire brought all that geek stuff out of the deep recesses of my noggin. Now, I do math everywhere I go. I cannot stop seeing numbers wherever I walk.
There are so many things to calculate: damage, card usage per turn (some relics restrict usage), and defense against incoming damage are a few considerations among many. I find comfort in all of these numbers; there really is no greater feeling than making the most super-optimal play that balances every aspect that I’ve mentioned, and then some.
Slay the Spire strikes a balance between in-game randomness and controllable, predictable outcomes that satisfy my perfectionist itch in ways that other deck-builders and roguelikes have missed. Next stop: memorizing every digit in pi. I’m going to own every single number in existence.
