Slay the Spire: The Board Game rules refresher

Read the refresher

You and the other players are climbing the Spire together, and you win by defeating the boss at the end of your final act. You do that by moving up a branching map, fighting combats, and using the rewards you earn to sharpen your deck. If any player's hit points reach zero, the whole party loses immediately.

For setup, each player takes a character board, mini, starter deck, card rewards deck with black borders, and rare rewards deck with yellow borders. Put a cube on Energy at 3, Block at 0, and hit points at the highest printed number. Lay out the Act One decks: Encounters, Elites, Events, Summons, plus Relics, Potions, Boss Relics, Daze, Status, and Curses. Shuffle everything except Summons, Daze, and Status. The 1st Encounter cards stay shuffled but separate from the Encounter deck. Take the Act One board, choose a map at random, then shuffle the map tokens face down, place dark tokens on dark spaces and light tokens on light spaces, and flip them all face up. Put your figures on the lowest open space, place a random Act One boss face down on the boss icon at the top, and put the boot meeple at the bottom next to the first encounter. Each player draws a Neow's Blessing, gains the red reward, then chooses one of the three blue rewards. Put those cards away, set up the 1st Encounter with one card in each player's row, and fight.

From there, the party moves the boot up the map one room at a time along the paths, resolving whatever room you land on, until you reach the boss. Combats are made of rounds, and each round is a shared Player Turn where everyone acts simultaneously, followed by an Enemy Turn. Rounds repeat until every enemy is dead.

The Player Turn has three parts. First, start of turn: set Energy back to 3 and Block to 0, draw five cards with no maximum hand size, then roll the die once. That single die result governs the whole round, both which actions die-based enemies will take and which die relic abilities trigger, and you do not roll again until next round. Then resolve start of turn abilities, start of combat abilities on the first turn, and die relic abilities, in any order you like.

Then the Play phase. Pay a card's Energy cost, choose targets, resolve its text top to bottom, and send it to your discard pile. Powers instead stay face up in front of you until combat ends. Energy maxes out at 6. You can target any enemy you like with your effects, and an area of effect symbol hits all enemies in one row and always hits the boss too. Any ability a card triggers waits until that card has finished resolving. Talk strategy freely, and you're encouraged to ask each other questions like how much damage or Block you have rather than look at a player's hand. When you're done, resolve end of turn abilities, then discard your hand.

On the Enemy Turn, enemies first lose all leftover Block. Then they act starting with the highest row, left to right, working down through the rows. Bosses always act last, and so does anything that says it acts last. Enemies hit the player in their row, unless the action has the area symbol, which hits all players. Some enemies do the same thing every turn, some do the action next to the die result, and some use a cube that slides down a track after every round, looping back to the topmost red slot when it reaches the bottom. Gray cube actions never repeat. Finally, slide those cubes and start a new round.

A few keywords worth pinning down. Block prevents one damage per point, up to twenty for a player, but it never prevents a lose hit points effect. Strength adds one damage to every hit, maximum eight. Vulnerable doubles the damage of each hit against the target, then you remove one token. Weak reduces each hit by one, then you remove one token. Both cap at three, and none of these tokens go away just because the round ended.

When the last enemy dies, combat ends immediately, unless a dying enemy is about to summon something. Resolve end of combat abilities, then take rewards. In a normal encounter you gain the rewards from the enemy in the row you ended combat in. In Elite and boss fights, every player gains the rewards. Then return your Powers, discard pile, and exhaust pile to your deck, pull out any Status and Daze cards, reset Block and Energy, and lose all tokens except gold. Players may switch rows any time before the next combat room.

For rewards, a card reward means revealing the top three of your card rewards deck and adding one to your deck or skipping, with the rest going to the bottom. A Golden Ticket adds the top card of your rare deck to your choices. You may skip any reward, and you may look at all the rewards from that room before committing. Potions can be passed to other players outside combat, but nothing else can be traded, and you cannot hold more than three potions. Boss relics reveal one per player plus one, and each player may take one. Remove takes a card out of your deck permanently. Upgrade flips a card to its green-text side. Transform removes a non-Curse card and replaces it with the top card of your card rewards deck at random.

Other rooms are quick. A Campfire lets each player either rest to heal three hit points or smith to upgrade a card. Treasure gives every player a relic. An Event is read aloud, and each player chooses one bracketed option and acts once, in any order. At a Merchant, put out three relics and three potions, and each player reveals the top three of their card rewards deck. Items cost the gold printed on them, with the top left relic one cheaper. Cards cost two, three, or six gold for common, uncommon, and rare. Removing a card costs three gold, once per player per Merchant room. You may pay for another player's purchase at a Merchant or an Event.

The act ends when you beat the boss at the top of the map. After taking rewards you can stop there, save and continue later, or press on. If you continue, swap in the next act's Encounter, Elite, Event, and Summons decks and shuffle them all except Summons, set up the new board and a new random boss, heal everyone to full, and reshuffle your card rewards deck including any cards you skipped, but not your rares. You win outright the moment you defeat whichever boss you have decided is your final one. The only way to lose is for a player to drop to zero hit points, and that ends the game for everyone on the spot.

A turn, played out

It is round 2 of a normal encounter in Act One, and you are in the top row. Your teammate is in the row below. Start of turn: your Energy goes back to 3, your Block drops to 0, and you draw 5 cards. The die comes up 4, and that one roll stands for the whole round. The enemy in your row has 12 hit points and no Block. It acts off the die, and the action next to 4 is 8 damage to you. The enemy in the lower row runs on a cube, and its cube sits on an area attack of 4 damage that will hit every player. You still carry 1 Strength token, and the enemy in your row still has 1 Vulnerable token from last round, because tokens do not vanish when a round ends. You pay 1 Energy for an attack card printed at 5 damage. Strength makes it 6, and Vulnerable doubles that to 12. Its last Vulnerable token comes off, and it dies with exactly 0 hit points left. Its 8 damage never happens. The area attack is still coming, so you spend 1 Energy on a card that gives you 5 Block. Your last Energy goes on a second 5 damage attack. You can target any enemy, so you send it at the lower row, where your Strength makes it 6. You discard your hand. On the Enemy Turn, the cube enemy hits both of you for 4. Your 5 Block soaks all of it, and 1 point is left over. Then its cube slides down the track, and round 3 begins.