I got into Slay The Spire a few months ago when I saw it on Apple Arcade. It’s a deck building roguelike video game where you collect cards every run and try to build a deck that’ll help you defeat your opponents and the boss. It’s a lot of fun, hoping that the cards you draw after each battle might be the right ones for the strategy you’ve adopted (usually due to whatever cards and power-ups you got earlier) and then figuring out how to make do with the cards you’re dealt. Sometimes it all falls into place, sometimes it goes up in smoke.
I’m also not entirely convinced I’m not playing the game wrong.
The thing about roguelikes is that you’re not supposed to be able to win every time. When I played FTL ages ago I started naming my ships Ship On Fire II, Ship On Fire III, and so on due to the number of times fires broke out inside my spaceship and led to my defeat (ironically, it was when I finally named my ship The Inflammable that I had my first victory). Key to these games is that recovering hit points is infrequent and difficult, enough so that conserving your health is paramount. Sometimes this can mean playing defensively, sometimes this means taking risks to finish a fight quickly and stave off further injury.
This doesn’t mean prioritizing playing all those dope cards you have that’ll turn your character into that perfect build — especially at the expense of extending the fight and losing hit points. Yes, drawing that card that increases your strength every turn will make you super powerful as the match goes on, but it doesn’t really make sense in a fight that won’t last more than a few turns. And yet, I keep doing it because, well, it’s cool. And because I love getting a build together where everything is running perfectly… even if it comes back to haunt me when I realize the hit points I lost setting up that perfect build against a weaker opponent would have been really useful agains the boss.
I have the same problem in Dice Forge. It’s a board game where you roll dice and use resources generated by those rolls to upgrade your dice — by literally popping off faces of the die and swapping in new tiles. You get one turn per round with the ultimate goal being to have the most victory points at the end. Thing is, I tend to get caught up in upgrading those dice into the perfect resource (and victory point) generating machine.. and then don’t try and have enough victory points to claim victory at the game’s end. If we’d had a few more rounds, you see, I’m sure I would have won. But, well, time is limited.
It’s honestly a pretty great bit of game design. There’s that Sid Meir quote I love, about how a game is “a serious of interesting choices.” Slay The Spire and Dice Forge both force the player to have to balance short term goals with the longer term one. And like any interesting choice, there’s room for someone like me to make the wrong one, choosing to lose the overall game in favor of making something really cool right now.
