Saturday Morning Gaming: Returning to the Spire
We talked about Slay the Spire back in July.
A deck-building combat game that had the three archetypical characters of Warrior, Assassin/Thief, and Mage. Well, they’ve introduced another character: The Watcher. This is the Ninja/Monk archetype. This character introduces two different new mechanics to the game: Retain and Stances.
Retain is easy enough to grasp. Up to this point, all of of the leftover cards in your hand were tossed into your discard deck when you ended your turn. Now, some cards have “Retain” on them and they are kept in your hand at the end of the turn to be available on your next turn. (Your hand size remains the same so the retained card means that instead of drawing 5 new cards (or how many you should draw) you’ll only be drawing 4 because the retained card is already in your hand.)
This allows you to eliminate some small amount of risk when it comes to what your next hand is going to be. You know that you’ve got this particular card that you can play. (Now, sometimes, it can be a pain because you’ll want a certain card and you won’t be able to draw as many cards as you’d like… but hey. That’s part of the game.)
The second mechanic the game introduces is the Stance. There are 4. The neutral stance is the default. Stanceless, I guess. The next two are the ones that are interesting: Calm and Rage. When you are in Calm, you don’t get any real bonus other than that leaving Calm will give you two additional energy next turn. When you enter Rage, you do double damage… but the downside is that you take double damage. So a good setup would be a card that puts you in Calm as your last card of round 1, and then a card that puts you in rage for your first card of round 2… now you have 2 extra energy and do double damage. (Better kill everything, though… or have a card that will put you back into Calm OR have you go back to a stanceless stance.)
The fourth stance is Divinity. You do TRIPLE damage in this stance… but it’s a difficult stance to get into (potions can do it, there are cards that help nudge you toward it) but, once in it, you do mega damage. (Best hope that you enter into it when you also get a good draw for damage.)
So far, I’ve encountered no fewer than three fun builds with the Watcher. A build where you jump back and forth between stances, a build where you pretty much stay out of Rage and just have a lot of defense and a lot of “Pressure Point” cards (similar to poison… you apply 8 “marks” and then every creature with a “mark” will take one point of damage for each one… I’m sure that you can see how this can be fun when you have multiple such cards and multiple enemies to fight), and a build where you are regularly jumping into Divinity. I die a lot but, dang, each one of these is FUN.
If you haven’t played Slay the Spire in a while, play it again. You’re going to be delighted by and frustrated with The Watcher.
So… what are you playing?
(Featured image is Slay the Spire opening screen. Screenshot taken by the author.)
I’m *not* playing Warcraft III – Reforged…
Waiting for the Harvard Business Review case study on Blizzard.
What makes me cringe isn’t that the Reforged version is inconsistent and meh (so I hear), its that along the way they decided to destroy the Original (which I also stopped playing, 1 or 2 decades ago – its hard to remember exactly how long its been since Blizzard knew how to make a game). So, not merely incompetent but seemingly maliciously so.
Whats funny to me is that while porting to my new system I contemplated whether I should re-install Battlenet (or whatever they call it now) and realized I hadn’t played a blizzard game in ages. I quite Diablo3 after maybe the second or third “season” when I realized that all they were going to do was mildly fiddle with the set-bonuses. They couldn’t even be arsed to add a new set every, say, 3 seasons or what not. Of course, D3 costs $0 so they gained nothing, but then I lost nothing.
Still… I said to myself, who am I kidding, I’ll buy the Reforged game just cause I like RT games and there aren’t a lot coming out… and hey, its Blizzard so it won’t be *merely* a reskin… they’ll update the genre (if maybe only incrementally). Buuuut… my faith in Blizzard was already dead, so I didn’t pre-order; I figured, sure, I bet I’ll buy it, but like D3 maybe it will take them a few years to take out the suck. Then again, will they care for a reskin? And lo how Blizzard has fallen.
Ultimately reskinning old games is the ultimate Meh! of game design, but how Blizzard can fail at reskinning is definitely worth a Harvard Business Review case study.Report
If I had to throw a guess out there (and I base this on stuff like the infamous Blizzcon from two years ago plus the Blitzchung Hong Kong support thing): “Millions of Chinese folks will pay for it anyway, so why put in effort for a few hundred thousand Americans?”Report
Now I wonder if the D3 Phone re-skin of the re-skin of the other game done totally in-house and not by a Chinese re-skinner will break D3? I mean, D3 is free but we all have Phones, right?
Maybe the Harvard Business review will be about how genius their 21st century strategy is playing out.Report
(Psst…it’s “Wrath,” not “Rage”
I really like this character. I’ve played The Watcher as a “Stance switcher/Flurry of Blows build” (FoB cost 0 to play and do minimal damage, but you get all of them back from your discard pile when you change stances). I’ve played the “Pressure Points” build (note: FUN but not sustainable). I’ve played a defensive build, a Wrath build (death is inevitable), and a Divinity build. Stance switcher is probably the best; Divinity builds will do TONS of damage but defense can be a problem. I haven’t yet figured out a use for Scrying, though.Report