Life is a Turn-based Strategy Game
Reflections from playing Slay the Spire for 20 hours in the last three days
I was going write a semester-in-review post, which I might still, but this is not that post (not entirely, that is). Instead, I wanted to talk about the game I’ve been addicted to for the past three days and how it is surprisingly insightful about life.
Slay the Spire is considered by many to be a magnum opus of a genre called turn-based strategy games, which is basically when players take turns during a fight to cast skills, attack, heal, etc. There are other common aspects of the genre beyond the basic mechanic from which it is named, and Slay the Spire is credited with inventing an entirely new subgenre within this genre called a “roguelike deck-building game”, which adds progression and uses cards instead of a set party of characters during fights (you can think of it kind of like Pokemon, but you take your entire deck to every fight).
The premise of Slay the Spire is that you play as one of four characters and build a deck to fight in a turn-based manner against different monsters, encountering different events, chests, rest sites/forge sites, along the way to the boss in each of the three floors. During each fight, you “draw” a set number of cards, which you can then play depending on how much energy they consume and how much energy you currently have. There are quite a lot of things you need to manage: your current deck, health, potential curse cards which give you ailments (such as being unplayable and clogging up your draw during fights as a result), relics, and potions.
Perhaps one of the main reasons Slay the Spire is so addicting is because of this depth of choice. Your choices carry real weight and complexity, which has led to countless streamers and guides which each painstakingly try to summarize general vibes on how to do well.
But the beauty of Slay the Spire is that while there are general vibes on how to do well, there is no one definitive solution — there are a lot of ways you can climb to the top of the spire. It is not only in this way that I think a lot of the strategies learned from playing Slay the Spire are applicable to life — there are a ton of nuanced ways in which the game directly applies. So without further ado, here are some reflections I had as a result of playing and how they relate in some ways to my past semester.
Act 1: Every Step is Important
One of the major mechanics of Slay the Spire is that there are three acts, and in each of the acts there are different things that you are expected to encounter and different things that you have to achieve by the end. A really beautiful thing about this game is that Act 1, Act 2, and Act 3 are all hard in their own ways.
In Act 1, you mostly only have your starting cards for your character, which may not be the strongest (mostly just strike which is the game’s starter attack option + defend), have only your starting relic (gives a perk to your character such as health regeneration or drawing extra cards at the first turn), and no potions. This makes it so for some characters you can play as especially, which have low base health or bad starting cards, it is legitimately a struggle to make sure your health is fine by the boss fight at the end of the floor, as well as to accumulate the correct cards and relics to be able to win the boss fight.
In Act 2, you are likely stronger, but need to accumulate the bulk of your strength before Act 3. In particular, Act 2 has the best question mark events, which basically are when you get random events when you choose to head to the question mark tiles on the map, which range from things like being able to upgrade or remove a card, getting a chest with coins and a relic, a random monster to fight, or even really random things like joining a cult to get a curse card or becoming a vampire to exchange your normal attack cards for “bites” which are attacks that heal health.
In Act 3, you encounter the hardest monsters and hardest boss. At this point, you should likely be making finishing touches to your deck and taking care of your health to get ready for the final boss fight.
The insight here is that you cannot just build for Act 3 starting from the very beginning — getting through Act 1 and Act 2 is equally as important because otherwise you cannot even reach Act 3. In particular, if you look at Slay the Spire tier lists, people will sometimes separate things into Act 1 and Act 2/Act3 because there are cards which are good in Act 1 but need to be phased out later. However, this does not mean that you do not pick up those cards — they could be crucial to getting through the floor as well as forming the basis for your deck strategy. In fact, there are some powerful cards that are inadvisable to pick up in Act 1, oftentimes because those cards need adequate support/synergy from other cards to work well and without that support they could singlehandedly make you die in Act 1 or 2.
Another way the game reflects the fact that cannot only build your deck around one goal is in its monster fights. There are three types of monsters: “hallway” monsters, elite monsters, and bosses. “Hallway” monsters are generally multiple monsters which each may have less health but probably have some sort of synergy that make them annoying (e.g. reviving teammates). Elite monsters are either one monster or group of monsters with a distinct theme and may mess with strategies that you have and test how much buffer room is in your deck, such as giving you curse cards, unplayable cards (to clog up your draw), or hexes which have penalties for playing certain kinds of cards. Bosses are generally one monster with some distinct power and attack pattern, and often have some way to massively deal damage. As such, you have to manage your health before then and have some strategy for damage mitigation; though a quirk of boss fights is that your health regenerates at the beginning of the next act, meaning there is less of an element of having to retain as much health as possible.
Your deck needs to be able to handle each of these kinds of fights. Specifically, “hallway” monsters are more trivial to deal with sometimes but without cards that damage multiple monsters or adequate defense, “hallway” fights could slowly chip down your health and block your ability to complete the boss fight. Similarly, elite monsters can add permanent curse cards to your deck if you are not careful, or just kill you then and there.
As such, you cannot just build for boss fights like in other games — doing so will likely lead you to die before even reaching the fight, or have such low health that the fight was lost before it begun. Additionally, a way that you get stronger is through getting free cards at the end of elite and hallway fights — so you have to be able to do well in these fights in order to get a deck that does well against bosses.
The best way to describe this is that every step is important. Slay the Spire drives home the fact that you cannot just hyper-optimize towards one major goal, or else this will lead towards disaster in other areas which may lead you to not even be able to reach that goal. In addition to this, just because something isn’t a long-term viable solution or needs to be phased out does not mean that it is not necessary.
In the past, I did not really realize this fact. This is evident in how I played another, albeit less involved, turn-based strategy game called Super Auto Pets. When I was playing in high school/freshman fall, I would look up strategies of what were the best pets to buy and then just wait for those pets to show up, not realizing that this strategy was costing me in terms of overall team synergy. Also, since you only have 5 health overall, because I was losing way too many fights in the early stages of the game, losing a single fight in the later stages of the game was enough to end my run.
I actually went back to playing Super Auto Pets for a bit after Slay the Spire and my win rate was a lot higher since I realized this principle. I will probably make some more allusions to this game in the next section as it is pretty interesting to view the change in my play-style as a reflection in what I’ve learned since freshman fall.
It is also pretty clear how these principles relate to real-life. An example is taking classes: some may be great students for the first part of classes, then after the class seems pretty easy for a while, stop trying as hard, only for them to be behind during the harder content and have no idea what is going on. The beginning parts of a class which may be “easier” are still essential to understanding what is going on overall and getting the intuitions necessary to handle harder content (a lesson I kind of learned for statistics this semester, lol).
Another example is how I learned coding. Without even realizing it, the way that I learned to code was in phases. I played around in Scratch for a long time which formed the intuitive base for how coding languages are structured and how to think about how different aspects of a program all piece together. Then, I began doing game development in C# which introduced more complicated topics like coroutines (parallel thread execution), the importance of thinking about user experience, and also gave me extended exposure to an actual, complex coding language. Finally, in Web.lab I learned how projects were managed and how relatively large and complex applications were built from the ground-up.
Something I keep saying to some of my friends is how much I now buy into the 10,000 hour rule by Malcolm Gladwell. The general gist is that if you spend 10,000 hours on something, you become an expert in it. I now think part of the reason may be because being able to spend 10,000 hours on something must mean that you have acquired a high degree of skill in it and gone through all of the necessary progressions to build up that skill — otherwise there is simply not 10,000 hours worth of things to do. And even if some of those intermediate progressions are not the final goal (Scratch, for example, is inherently a starter language in some ways), they may be still necessary as a way to break into a complex topic and set up the foundation for later down the line.
Another thing that I think relates to real life is that hallway fights are still important fights — keeping a good sleep schedule and social life may seem like one of the first things to sacrifice when pressed for time, but by sacrificing these things you are actually shooting yourself in the foot. You need to complete hallway fights to get the cards necessary to complete boss fights, like how you need a sleep schedule and social life to get the mental sanity needed to complete your pset or your job interview. Eventually, attempting to brute force your way into just doing work for many days straight counterintuitively makes you less productive than if you took the appropriate breaks and added enjoyment to your life as motivation to work harder.
Act 2: Knowing When to Give Up
I actually played Slay the Spire a couple of times during freshman fall on someone else’s computer, and one mechanic I completely overlooked was the necessity of removing cards from your deck. Some cards which are obvious to remove are curse cards, which add some sort of handicap to your deck. However, a somewhat surprising and insightful fact is that you also should be removing your starting strike and defend cards by around Act 2 and 3.
According to reddit (lol), one of the most common beginner mistakes is not realizing why this is. After all, these cards provide decent utility and have only 1 energy cost. However, the key realization here is that even though these cards are “good”, they are taking the place of cards that are even better — by keeping these cards in your deck, you are preventing yourself from seeing great cards more often.
Another insight in a similar vein is that there are certain archetypes of decks one may want to build toward for each character you can play as. For example, for the Ironclad character, you can generally go for a strength build (in which you spam a lot of the strength buff and get huge attack numbers), a block build (in which you get a lot of cards which give you huge defense capabilities), or an exhaust build (in which you decrease energy of skills in exchange for exhausting/shrinking your deck in the middle of a fight). However, you can’t just go for these builds straight off the bat — cards are presented with randomness and luck so if you only want a specific build, a key card could never appear and ruin your run as a result. Instead, you can only go based on what you see and have — even if you really, really want to build a strength build, if corruption shows up, you should highly consider going for an exhaust deck.
In this way, to climb to the top of the spire, you have to be flexible — to be not afraid to give up on the things that you wanted to in order to make the correct decisions for your overall run.
Another final thing I alluded to is that there are four different characters you can play. Each of them has slightly different starting decks and cards/mechanics which can be played by them— making them have different strengths and weaknesses and play-styles as well. As Ironclad, you can afford to be more aggressive in Act I because of your health regeneration and more strike/defend cards; while as the Silent you have to be very careful not to die in Act I but have access to some really good cards as you progress through the acts. A god-tier card for Ironclad is not necessarily a god-tier card for Silent — because they have different strengths and weaknesses which manifests in choosing different cards to channel strengths/cover weaknesses. In this way, when you play a different character, you have to know which strategies are not viable for your character and know when to strategically give up fights, relics, or cards strong for other characters in order to do well.
These principles, especially the first two, are applicable in Super Auto Pets as well. When I used to play, I was hyper-fixated on specific builds such as the “double dragon” build or the “token spam” build for each run, not realizing that since you cannot really control which animals show up in the shops, going for one strategy from the very beginning and not knowing when to give up was significantly making my runs worse. Similarly, there are some early animals like swan or worm which are great if you can build them up before a certain time period in the game — but if you have been unlucky for a while for getting copies of the animals and leveling them up, you have to know when to swap them out and give up on building them.
Of course, there are also applications to real life. If last semester, my takeaway was to keep pushing and not give up, this semester, a large part of my takeaway was the importance of giving up. Knowing when something is good but is blocking the room for great, and knowing when a plan or aspiration is not working has helped me manage expectations and make complicated but necessary choices. One of my major issues in the past was waiting too long before deciding to give up — losing out on opportunity cost in terms of better choices I could have made. A clear example of this has been research — staying a long time in a project you don’t really like in the hopes of something maybe coming from it is a terrible experience, and it is much better to find a new project you are truly excited about. Similarly, even if I really like the idea of something, if I do it and I find it boring, that does not mean I should just continue with it in the hopes of it becoming what I wanted it to be (there are specific examples in mind but they are decently private).
I also found this pretty interesting post while writing this Substack by the New Yorker. In it, there’s a particularly insightful quote as follows:
Burkeman isn’t saying that we should give up completely on our ambitions, hopes, plans, and so on. Instead, his idea is that acknowledging our limits will allow us to accomplish more of what matters to us while “enjoying life now.”
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/should-you-just-give-up
I think this particularly applies to the third insight— while weaknesses and strengths are much more malleable than in Slay the Spire, there are still things you tend to be better at currently and things you are worse at currently. Being realistic about what you will or will not do in situations, as well as if you can actually handle something is important for planning your next move. If I know that I cannot be trusted to not talk with friends while working together unless there is an enforcement mechanism such as a quiet library/stud 5 quiet, then when studying with people I need to make an intentional choice to head to those areas with them, instead of thinking I would overcome the urge to talk and being disappointed when I inevitably talk with them. I also tried a (somewhat extreme) social experiment during finals week this year of disabling safari and automatically turning off my phone at 10 pm every day. The results were that it actually did help somewhat, in that my bedtime was more consistent after doing this. Another good example is that I actually was going to take 4 technicals and 1 humanities course this semester until I was talked out of it by a professor I admire— her reasoning was that this was way too much and that I would learn each class poorly. In hindsight, she was completely correct, and even after switching to 3 technicals and 2 humanities I was still overwhelmed this semester. Especially since I was not familiar with the content of any of my technicals and both my humanities courses were very involved (frequent quizzes, readings, and writings), I definitely could’ve realized the outcome from the very beginning.
Nowadays, I am also more of a fan of moderation. Not being able to be the absolute best at something does not mean that you have wasted all of your time, and not all battles need to be won. I had my best hackathon experience ever during HackMIT this year, and it was because our team collectively “gave up” on grinding super hard before it started and decided to take it chill and do things we enjoyed. Somehow, this actually resulted in our project doing better than my project did last year at HackMIT, which my entire team had pulled an all-nighter for. A lot of things are also just luck-based: you can only increase your success probability but not guarantee it, and knowing what you are good at and bad at (currently) is important for increasing this win-rate.
Act 3: Enjoying the Process
After finals were over, I decided to download highly rated free games as a way to celebrate. A major realization I had while playing these games was that these free games have a hidden cost — your time. In a lot of these games, the way that you progress is not increasing skill but rather grinding, such as by completing daily tasks and repeatedly trying to get very low-chance characters. Eventually, I realized that I was not actually enjoying playing the games, but doing it just because of my desire for progression and my desire to not buy games. To remedy this, I wanted to buy Slay the Spire and see if my conjecture was correct— and it was.
One grinds in Slay the Spire as well— but it is not through mindless tasks like “auto-battle this boss 3x”. Instead, each run, you try improving upon what you messed up last run, or learn a new character/skillset better, or try different choices this time around. The difference between Slay the Spire and a lot of free-to-play games is that you spend a lot of time on Slay the Spire because there is a skill barrier worth conquering, not because there is a time/grind barrier needed to do well.
The game is incredibly unforgiving — if you die, you die. But that is part of the fun, because there are stakes and because your choices and mistakes have weight.
I think this has made me also realize what may be difference between a fulfilling and unfulfilling life, at least in my eyes. In either, grinding is probably a part of it — after all, you need to grind if you want to achieve the things you want to achieve. However, an unfulfilling life is meaningless grinding: doing a pset because you have to do it, being stuck in an extracurricular because it seems like something you would like, and doing things just because other people think it would be cool if you did them. A fulfilling life is meaningful grinding: because you want to change something, because you want to learn a new skill or try something new, because doing something over and over again and committing is a kind of enjoyment in of it itself. Making mistakes is a part of the process — you realize what you did was wrong and you don’t do it again, and even if you do, it is fine since you have another run to try again. For example, writing my last substack post On Regret was a mistake because I did not do well on the statistics test I was supposed to study for instead of writing the post — and during finals week, I resisted the urge to write a post successfully. I have said in my previous posts that it is never too late to change, but an additional piece of this is that just because you changed doesn’t mean your mistakes weren’t meaningful as well. The process of doing something wrong and overcoming it is essential and an integral part of life. After all, if you made no mistakes, there would be no need to continue doing runs. And, there is no need to be ashamed of the mistakes your past self made— because without those mistakes, you would not be where you are today.
Finale
This post turned out to be longer than expected, so I’ll keep this short. I don’t regret the 20 hours I “wasted” on Slay the Spire, instead of doing something “productive” like learning C++, and I don’t regret the way that I spent my semester in hindsight, even though it was very rough at times and I wouldn’t do it again. One thing I have been learning through this past semester is how to have empathy and compassion for myself, and understanding the wrong choices I’ve made and coming out stronger.
Slay the Spire has been a conduit for these thoughts, and I will likely learn even more intricacies which hold more life lessons as I continue playing. But until then, I wish you good luck for now, in slaying the spires of your own life.
when you talked about collecting cards on the way streaming algorithms came into mind…thank god that toxic relationship is over
so real