Strange Bedfellows: Slay the Spire and Nowhere Prophet Devs on the Rise of the Roguelike Card Game
Trends will always wax and wane in gaming, whether they be something as old-school as the character platformer, or something more modern like a battle royale game. Things aren’t quite cyclical – not yet at least – but they unquestionably come around in groups. Maybe it would be more apt to compare them to migrating birds, or perhaps a roving horde of cats, either way, you will often find similar games releasing at similar times.
At the moment, we’re going through something of a renaissance of the roguelike genre, one which – despite so few people remembering the original game – has taken over much of the industry, like a very friendly parasite. Well, a benign parasite assuming you don’t mind being killed and brought back to life a lot. This isn’t the only genre to see a resurgence though, we’re also being flooded with new card games. Not the kind that you might remember from mythological days of the 1990s (I feel so old making this joke), but instead, new takes that are inspired by classic games like Magic: the Gathering.
Roguelikes are defined by their repetition, their use of procedural generation, and often the need to make the most of whatever you’re given. They’re fun because they’re chaotic, and because rather than acquiring better abilities, most of your progress in one will be due to your own skill level increasing.
Card games, on the other hand, are more defined by the careful precision you put into building the deck itself. While there is variance to take into account, your aim as the person building the deck is to make that variance as low as possible, with the aim of always being able to carry out a specific game plan.
The two don’t really seem like ideal bedfellows. Yet, we’re seeing a whole new wave of games that fuses the two together that are incredibly popular and receiving rave reviews. Somehow mixing the careful planning of a card game with the purposeful chaos of the roguelike is working. Despite this strange combination, we’re seeing more and more games fuse the two together.
This isn’t always as simple as things being copied or inspired by a specific game either; it could well just be the gaming equivalent of simultaneous invention, a concept that suggests that certain creations can be made across the globe as a result of the same kind of stimuli but from different people. So while the roguelike elements of Hearthstone or even just the recent resurgence in digital card games might seem as though they would be the inspiration, there’s more too it than that.
To find out exactly why this blend of genre is appearing, and also how they came about, I chatted to Martin Nerurkar (Designer of Nowhere Prophet) and Anthony Giovannetti (Founder of Megacrit, the company behind Slay the Spire) to find out just why this has happened.
I asked both of them about their inspirations for the games; after all, it’s an important thing to consider when looking at something new. Nerurkar said “Initially it was my search for conflict mechanics that were abstract and could represent a fight, a discussion, a chase etc. From there, I ended up with a card combat system. That was the core from which the game grew.”
Of course, that wasn’t all that inspired it, “Clear inspirations are obviously Mad Max (Fury Road…), FTL, Banner Saga, Magic: The Gathering, Hearthstone and Dream Quest. All wonderful properties I love.”
Giovannetti gave a very succinct answer about his inspirations as well, ”I had a heavy background as a card game player, and played many many hours of deck builders like Dominion.”
That all adds up when you think about creating a card game in and of itself, but what about the fusion between that and the at odds nature of a roguelike?
“Well, I started off with a card game that had a lot of promise, but I wanted it to be in a larger setting. I knew I did not want to make a multiplayer game, for many different reasons, and so the pattern of something like FTL seemed like a perfect fit. A lot of variation, interesting world and story to discover and a challenging tactical layer as conflict resolution” Nerurkar tells me.
You might have expected to hear that Slay the Spire had influenced the more recent Nowhere Prophet, but it seems that’s not the case. Still, the weird mix seems unusual, I thought I’d go one further and ask what the hardest thing was about developing a game like this.
“Getting the UI/UX just right. In Slay the Spire, we convey a ton of information to the player, and we had to iterate a lot on how to best display everything to the player without overloading them,” Giovannetti said. When playing a game like Magic: The Gathering or even the Pokémon TCG it can take an hour or two just to learn the rules, let alone the nuance behind specific card combinations. Each card tries to have all the info you could need on it, but you can’t do that in a game like Slay the Spire because it has to be immediately approachable, so it has to be kept simple. If you consider the fact that each card has a cost, an effect, special effects, then you have potions and artefacts as well, you can see why that would be tough to squeeze into a tutorial. That’s without even mentioning the enemies or your own health or stats.
Nerurkar had his own problems too. “One of the big challenges was a card combat system that is both dense and wide enough so that it can represent a lot of different challenges. The first iteration of the card system I had did not fulfil this criteria. Fights seemed too similar too often, and I wanted something that would develop across one run, and also shift between runs. The combat grid is a godsend here.”
He also admits that some of the challenges he faced were due to the way he was developing the game. “It was the fact that I am the only full-time developer on it. I do all the game design, all the coding and I am responsible for all the decisions. There’s no counterweight to my designer-brain going crazy and iterating on something for too long.” Perhaps the most surprising thing is how Giovannetti sees the pairing of roguelikes and card games.
“Card games and roguelikes make for a natural mechanical pairing as roguelikes give a good mechanical reason to build different decks every time you play.” If you’ve ever ended up really heavily into a card game, then you probably know just how enjoyable building your own deck is. Every time you come across a new combination or synergy, you get to feel like a genius. That feeling is a big part of what makes Slay the Spire so enjoyable, and the pairing was logical to that team, despite how it may seem from the outside.
But to Giovannetti it makes sense. “They were a great pairing that had a lot of complementary traits. Card games are about trying new strategies and experimenting with what works. Roguelikes are as well.” So, it’s actually the similarities between the two that makes them a natural pairing, not necessarily the natural enemies you might assume.
In fact, it’s not just a natural pairing, it turns out that both card games and roguelikes have similar mechanics, at least as Nerurkar explains things: “The random nature of a roguelike is not too far away from the random nature of booster packs. Both are the source of cards and determine the deck you can build. The key challenge was making sure that the two systems interact well enough to make gameplay fun.”
Despite what appears to be a mixing of order and chaos, it’s much more just a logical melding of two systems that ask you to work with what you’ve got. While the initial idea of combining the RNG of a roguelike with the order required to build a cohesive card game, they share a lot of DNA in their mechanics if you’re looking at it from a different angle. Sure, if you’re only looking at deck-building, then RNG needs to be eliminated for a deck to work well, but card games are so much more than that one aspect.
It could well be that there are yet more natural pairings when it comes to both roguelikes and card games, we just have to wait for another creative mind to step in and create it. Maybe we’ll end up playing more games akin to the fleeting first-person tower defence genre, or the peculiar pairing of action and strategy, like Brutal Legend. Video games are at their best when we’re seeing something new, and as that gets harder to do, the mixing of two seemingly opposed things is a great step in the right direction.
