Slay the Spire II

Full Throttle was amazing, but The Dig really clicked with me.

The secret fourth answer is Slay the Spire is no new cards.

Auron is the best answer.

Carrying around that sake bottle like a badass Ronin.

I've played less Hearthstone this last week than I have in a very long time, and it is not because of the state of the game.

Yeah, and...

I have to admit, I did get distracted by another game, which was Slay the Spire 2.

I also have been distracted by Slay the Spire 2.

Well, it's coming soon.

Actually, I did get to Ascension 10 in Slay the Spire 2.

Oh.

And it's fucking impossible.

Kind of a while away.

Yeah.

Pam started playing Slay the Spire 2 also.

She has like 30 hours in it already.

So I took a little break around the time we last recorded.

I'm pretty sure that's when Slay the Spire 2 came out, and I really like Slay the Spire 1, so I played that a bunch.

And then I remember going back to Night Rain a little bit after that, maybe like a month or two, and I played it a bunch.

Then I took another break.

I'm Kerri Shao, and you're listening to the Game Maker's Notebook.

I'm thrilled to talk to Casey Yano, the co-founder of Megacrit and the co-designer and co-developer of Slay the Spire and Slay the Spire 2.

The first Slay the Spire released in 1.0 in January 2019, and nine years later it's sitting at 76,000 reviews on Steam, and it's considered the game that popularized rogue-like deck building games.

Casey and his team released Slay the Spire 2 into early access in March 2026 and made a huge splash with its addition of four-player co-op mode.

We had so much to talk about, starting with how he met his co-founder, Anthony Giovanetti, in college and through the 11 years of Megacrit making Slay the Spire and Slay the Spire 2.

Enjoy.

[upbeat music]

Two, because Slay the Spire was truly the game that finally made deck builders click for me, and I'm so interested in the process of how you discovered everything.

um again like i have seen the major arcs of the show but i've never watched it all the way through and i'm really happy that i finally did it uh the end of season four for me competes with the best that clone wars ever did and i think it's the delivery of everything the four seasons build up to so it was great as i expected uh that up to date on kitchen nightmares and master chef No movies.

Only game I played was Slay the Spire 2 with Justin and Kyle on Tuesday.

We had a crazy-ass run.

Justin, obviously, you were there for it, but Kyle and I were both playing Defect, and for some reason we were both doing a Frost build, and we got to the point where we had over 350 block, which... we had never seen numbers that high before, and Justin was just building a sword to do a one-shot.

That's what I've been watching.

Big J, I know you had a crazy work week.

Yeah, I actually I've only played one video game and that was Slay the Spire 2.

Wow, is that the first time