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Slay the Spire is the best roguelike deckbuilder of all time. I remember seeing it released in early access in 2017 and it took over all sorts of Twitch streams that I watched at the time. Despite loving card games and despite having enjoyed playing other hybrid-roguelikes[1] of the era[2], I didn't buy and play Slay the Spire until it officially launched on the Nintendo Switch in June of 2019 as a game for plane rides across the country for work and visiting friends.
Ever since, Slay the Spire has been a game that I play almost exclusively while traveling, whether while in transit or at my destination. I play each character's new ascension level in order before I move onto the next level. I have not beaten A20 on any character yet, but I'm at A10 on all of them, and the game hasn't lost its magic for me. In 2024, I began a completely different relationship with the game: one where I play it for hours at home and with friends.
Modded Slay the Spire
Over the years since its launch, I had learned about the Downfall mod from its original trailer and its updated version, and I'd also learned of the mod that Jorbs worked on, but I wasn't interested in trying either of them, since I wanted to get through A20 first before augmenting the 1-player experience.
Then, last year, my friend who I worked with on Wizard Sokoban[3] introduced me to another set of mods. He and I had previously played Nuclear Throne together and been blown away at how well the mod community could execute multiplayer in a game like that. We took a look at Spire With Friends, but ultimately found it lacking.
While it does offer a free way to play an online game of Slay the Spire semi-cooperatively, Spire With Friends has you each battling your own regular enemy individually, as though you were just playing the one-player game at the same time, with minor changes to make it feel like you can have an effect on each other's progress. There are new nodes on the map called "Couriers" that allow for trading between players, but because the mod is all designed around asynchronous play, you don't need to both be at the Courier to trade: one of you can leave cards for the other to pick up (or ignore!) when they get to that node. Because of this, we found it was a little bit too easy to "cheese" the game by taking bad cards out of your deck to put in the courier's send slot, and having the other player simply not take them from that slot when they arrive.
After a few tries of Spire With Friends, we tried out a different mod, which we've now been happily going back to for months.
Together in Spire
Together in Spire is another cooperative mod, but you actually play the game simultaneously and next to each other. Everyone in the game enters into the same room against the same enemy -- whose max health is scaled with the number of players -- and then the enemy only takes their turn once everyone in the room has clicked the End Turn button. Play continues like this, synchronized depending on who is in the room at a given time. While this can be a little grueling in parts of the late game if your friend is going infinite and you're just hanging on, we found that the difficulty and playstyle far better matched what we were looking for out of cooperative Slay the Spire than any of the alternatives.
Each battle, there's usually a little bit of discussion about who will be able to apply negative effects like vulnerable or weak to the enemy, then everyone plays their damage in mostly whatever order, and sometimes we have some discussion about trying to end a given fight on a certain turn for relic or card reasons. The early fights, especially against elites can be difficult, while most of the rest of the game becomes trivially easy with more players. With two people, we find that ascension levels up to around 15 are pretty straightforward without having to do a lot of math or double-checking. With four, there's usually only one or two times in a run where anyone is in any serious danger of dying.
At every campfire, there's a new free (optional) action for trading and another new action called "Resurrect." Resurrect allows you to bring a dead teammate back to life. If they died far from a campfire, then you have to figure out a path to get to a campfire safely with whoever you have left. Trade allows any two people on the team to trade up to one relic, three potions, and three cards at a time. You both have to lock in the trade to make it take place, and unlike the Courier in Spire With Friends, you must take anything you agree to be traded. I really like that they made a way for the coop game to continue going even if one person dies, but also because Resurrect takes up the action that a person would normally do at the campfire, there's a real cost to having to do it. I find it makes the rest of the run feel earned, even if there's a death.
At shops, you can trade gold with any other player as much as you like, which is a nice quality of life thing without being game-breaking.
The game also autosaves, which means that even internet trouble or having to take a break doesn't get in the way of a good run.
Setup Instructions
Getting mods to work with Slay the Spire doesn't require Steam, but the workshop items tend to make it easy enough for non-technical people who can follow directions to be able to do. For Together in Spire, you need to own Slay the Spire and download the following mods, which you can do by clicking the subscribe button in the workshop:
Once all of these are installed properly, you'll have an option to start Slay the Spire with mods active. Depending on the operating system, we saw this fail the first attempt on Mac, followed by it working just fine every time after that. Make sure all of these mods are enabled, and then the game should boot up, and you should be able to see "Multiplayer" as an option in your starting menu.
One player can host a room for you all to play in, and they can set the settings they want to use in terms of both difficulty of the game once it's started and also who is allowed into the room. I'd highly recommend "Friends Only" so that only people you're friends with on Steam can access. One time, we had a troll try to join our game and use cheats to win faster than we could.
Joining a game can be done through the steam friends menu, and technically doesn't have to be at the very beginning of the game, though that's what we've always done so that we can play through everything together.
Note that A20 has had a bug for us where only 2/4 people wind up fighting the second boss of Act 3. Otherwise, there have been no bugs that have gotten in the way of a game, thankfully.
Future Considerations
As a way to play a cooperative card game with low stakes and interesting challenges, Together in Spire has absolutely delivered for us. There have been runs where we all roll random characters, runs where we each take one of the four main characters, and runs where we've all chosen the same character.[4]
We find that as we all get comfortable playing, the game gets easier, so we look for harder challenges to impose. There's a "Hell" difficulty that's separate from the ascension levels that we'd like to try out. We've also talked about trying to do 2v2 races where you have to try to take different paths from one another and the first team to beat the heart wins.
At the very least, having a game that has very little timing-specific gameplay, only requires a mouse and a pretty unsubstantial computer and internet connection to play, and whose runs can be an interesting way to spend a few hours in a given evening hanging out on a voice call, I imagine my friends and I will continue to play this for a while going forward.
In conversation, I'd probably just use the shorthand "roguelikes" and let context clues do their thing, but I figure being extra intentional with word choice can help avoid "rogue/-like/-lite/etc" discourse. ↩︎
The ones I played were mostly Nuclear Throne, Enter the Gungeon, Dungeon of the Endless, and Don't Starve. I was also very familiar with Spelunkey, Binding of Isaac, and Crypt of the Necrodancer at that point, but had either bounced off of them or had never given them a fair shot. ↩︎
Now rebranded as Snails and Sorcery ↩︎
We all did Ironclad and realized that we could use the campfire trades to ensure one player had a deck that could go infinite on turn one every fight. It was goofy as hell, but it was also this person's first time playing online with the mods, so what better way to get acclimated, I suppose? ↩︎