SLAY THE SPIRE
Format PC
Developer Mega Crit Games
Publisher Humble Bundle
Origin US
Release 2017
Graphical capabilities may have soared over the years, the scope of what games can represent opening up ever further, yet it’s increasingly common to find ourselves back at a virtually recreated tabletop, shuffling digital simulacra of cards, in titles such as Gwent, Artifact and, of course, Hearthstone. But none of these games were in Anthony Giovannetti’s head when he first started thinking about his own digital card game, Slay The Spire. He was much more interested in their analogue predecessors.
“At a really young age, I got into Magic: The Gathering, and it became an increasingly large part of my life, just playing card games,” Giovannetti tells us. “At some point, I jumped from Magic into Netrunner pretty deeply. I got really involved in the scene and created Stimhack, the largest Netrunner fan site at the time.” He’s since drifted away from both games, but his experiences – and occasional frustrations – with them fed directly into the creation of what would become Slay The Spire.
Nevertheless, Giovannetti says that, some early physical prototyping aside, he never seriously considered making as anything other than. And half of the team – that is, Yano – didn’t even play physical card games. As far as Yano is concerned, ’s presentation – with cards, laid out in roughly the format established by Magic, moving from a deck to a hand to a discard pile – is just convenient shorthand. “There’s a strong familiarity there, and it sets expectations,” he says. “If we make cards fly around and borrow elements from existing physical games, this let players understand [the game] in a more intuitive way.”
