You sat down for "one quick run." Six hours later you were still negotiating with the Act III boss over whether your Defect build was actually cooked or secretly brilliant. Slay the Spire 2 hit Steam Early Access on March 5, 2026, peaked at over 574,000 concurrent players, and became the biggest roguelike launch in Steam history — and now the discourse is everywhere: new characters, branching act paths, four-player co-op, and arguments about whether The Sovereign or The Bonebinder is the more busted class. But Early Access is still Early Access. The 1.0 is months away. You need something to do with your hands.
The internet will cheerfully hand you a list of games like Slay the Spire 2 and make sure Balatro and Monster Train are at the top. They're correct — but obvious. What this list does differently is match each recommendation to a specific reason you love Slay the Spire: the synergy-hunting, the relic economy, the branching map routing, the feeling of a run finally clicking twenty minutes before you need to go to sleep. Balatro and Hades 2 are here, yes, because they've genuinely earned their places. But so are some picks that don't show up on every "best roguelikes" list — titles that scratch exactly the right itch while MegaCrit finishes building the full Spire. These are the best games like Slay the Spire 2 to keep your deck-building brain occupied right now.
If Slay the Spire is the king, Monster Train has always been the crown prince making a convincing case for the throne — and the sequel released mid-2025 while you were looking elsewhere. Shiny Shoe's follow-up deepens the original's three-floor tower defense structure with new clan combinations, expanded unit synergy systems, and a meta-progression tree that makes each unlocked run feel meaningfully different from the last. The thing that set the first Monster Train apart was its insistence that every decision — which floor to stack your units on, which spells to draft for a critical moment — mattered, and that remains completely intact here. Runs tend to run longer than Slay the Spire's, which is either a feature or a warning depending on your relationship with sleep.
Best for: Players who love StS2's multi-faction synergy hunting and want a deckbuilder that rewards thinking three turns ahead.
Balatro
PC · PS5 · Xbox Series X/S · Switch · Mobile
GOTY-Level Addiction
Yes, everyone recommends Balatro. Everyone recommends it because it is correct. LocalThunk's poker-flavored roguelike took 2024's Game of the Year conversation by force, sold well over five million copies, and has since landed on mobile where it's eating even more hours of people's commutes. The surface concept — build a poker hand, use Joker cards to amplify it into absurd scoring chains — sounds simple right up until you're spending twenty minutes calculating whether a Holographic Joker paired with a Blueprint doubles your multiplier chain or breaks it. What connects it to Slay the Spire is that specific pleasure of watching your deck theory translate into a run that absolutely pops off in Act III. The numbers get so large they stop being numbers.
Best for: Players who love Slay the Spire's relic economy and the feeling of a build finally clicking in the final act.
03
Roguelike / Puzzle / Horror
Daniel Mullins' Inscryption is the game that deckbuilder fans who haven't played it are always looking for, even when they don't know it yet. You're trapped in a cabin playing cards against a hooded figure called Leshy, and the roguelike deck-building underneath the surface is genuinely excellent — scarce resources, creative sacrifices, and a map system with its own emergent tension. Then the game does something to itself that changes everything, and talking about it any further would be a crime. What it shares with Slay the Spire 2 is the deep pleasure of learning an opponent's patterns, finding the crack, and exploiting it with a perfectly assembled hand. It's shorter than most games on this list, but denser per hour than almost any of them.
Best for: Players who loved decoding Slay the Spire's enemies through repeated runs and want a deckbuilder that actively surprises them about genre itself.
04
Roguelike Deckbuilder / RPG
Klei Entertainment — the studio behind Don't Starve and Oxygen Not Included — built a sci-fi roguelike where you manage two separate decks simultaneously: one for combat, one for negotiation. Every interaction in Griftlands, from picking a faction fight to haggling a merchant out of a rare item, runs through the same card-based logic. This doubles the synergy surface area in a way Slay the Spire never had to consider, and it makes the political consequences of each run feel genuinely stressful in the best possible way. Killing someone costs you their faction's goodwill; talking your way past them costs negotiation cards you might need later. It's the only game on this list where diplomacy feels as risky as combat.
Best for: StS2 players who wish the map's event nodes had more mechanical teeth — and who like making enemies as thoughtfully as they draft cards.
Looking at these four together, something becomes clear about why Slay the Spire 2's Early Access launch hit so hard: players aren't just chasing a game, they're chasing a specific kind of thinking. The best games like Slay the Spire 2 are the ones that respect your intelligence enough to give you a problem with no obvious solution — and then watch you build one anyway. The genre has spent the last decade learning that lesson. The next four entries take it in directions MegaCrit hasn't even attempted yet.
Hades 2
PC · PS5 · Xbox Series X/S · Switch 2
The Genre Standard
Supergiant Games dropped Hades 2's full 1.0 release in September 2025, and it delivered on every promise the original made plus several it never got around to. Playing as Melinoë, Zagreus's sister, you fight through the Underworld and up into Mount Olympus, building boon synergies from the Greek pantheon across runs in a way that rewards both careful planning and opportunistic improvisation — which is, quietly, exactly what made the original Slay the Spire's map navigation so compelling in the first place. The Magick system adds tactical depth the first game never had, and the sheer density of narrative — story beats that unlock only after dozens of runs — mirrors Slay the Spire 2's emerging lore drip exactly. It's also the most polished game on this list, and it's not particularly close.
Best for: Players who love Slay the Spire 2's co-op potential and want a roguelite where combat feels as kinetic as the decision-making is strategic.
Blue Prince is not technically a deckbuilder, and it is absolutely on this list. The 2025 puzzle roguelite from Dogubomb puts you inside a procedurally generated manor where each room drafts from a randomized pool of cards that you choose before entering — then plays out its spatial and mechanical consequences in ways that compound run over run. If the specific joy of Slay the Spire 2 is the moment you see a relic interact with a card you drafted two acts ago in a way you didn't fully plan, Blue Prince delivers that sensation in three dimensions. It was one of the most discussed games of 2025 precisely because it found a completely novel angle on the roguelike map-routing problem that Slay the Spire popularized. You will stare at a floor plan for ten minutes and feel like a genius. You are not a genius. The manor wins.
Best for: StS2 players obsessed with map routing and branching act decisions who want a roguelite that turns that skill into a spatial puzzle game.
Wildfrost is the game that presents itself as aggressively adorable — round-edged art, Arctic palette, companions who look like they belong on a children's plushie shelf — and then systematically destroys you with a difficulty curve that has no patience for sloppy drafting. Developed by Deadpan Games, the core mechanic adds a countdown timer to every unit, meaning cards and companions don't just play on demand; they fire on their own schedule, and managing those timers while also planning your offensive sequence is genuinely its own puzzle on top of the deck-building. The counter system adds a layer of positional and tempo awareness that Slay the Spire's combat never required, which is exactly why it feels fresh while covering similar ground. Veterans of the original Slay the Spire who found Ascension 20 too comfortable will find Wildfrost's mid-run difficulty spikes extremely bracing.
Best for: Slay the Spire veterans who've hit Ascension 15 and need a deckbuilder whose difficulty ceiling is genuinely disrespectful.
You cannot talk about Slay the Spire without eventually arriving at FTL, the 2012 Subset Games release that crystallized the modern roguelike's design logic before MegaCrit had even started writing card text. You captain a starship through procedurally generated sectors, making resource allocation decisions under permanent time pressure — crew assignments, weapon systems, shield upgrades — and every single sector hop carries the knowledge that the flagship at the end is going to be a nightmare regardless of how well-prepared you think you are. What FTL shares with Slay the Spire 2 is the philosophy: runs are learning events, not failure events. The death that ended your best run in Sector 7 is the data that makes your next run survivable. It costs under $10 and has aged with complete dignity.
Best for: Players who love Slay the Spire 2's branching map decisions and resource scarcity — and want to understand where the genre's founding principles came from.
The Bottom Line
The best games like Slay the Spire 2 aren't chasing the same formula — they're chasing the same feeling: a decision that mattered, a run that finally clicked, a moment where your draft theory stopped being theoretical. Slay the Spire 2 will get its 1.0. Until then, the genre it helped build has more than enough to offer. And if you want more roguelike deep-dives, our 5 roguelites that give Hades a run for its money and our breakdown of the most stressful survival games are worth a look while you sharpen your draft instincts.
★ Also Worth Your Time
If you've cleared every game above, consider Across the Obelisk (a co-op deckbuilder for four that shares StS2's new multiplayer DNA), Dicey Dungeons (Terry Cavanagh's proof that randomness can be a design tool, not an excuse), and Roguebook — a dual-hero deckbuilder from Magic: The Gathering legend Richard Garfield that hasn't gotten nearly enough attention.
The roguelike renaissance that Slay the Spire helped ignite a decade ago hasn't peaked — it's still accelerating. Slay the Spire 2's Early Access record suggests there are more players ready for this kind of game than the genre has ever seen, and the titles above exist because a generation of developers played the original until 3 AM, died on Act III to a bug beaked enemy they should have seen coming, and thought: I could do something interesting with this. The player who finds their way to FTL at the end of this list, or who loses a Wildfrost run to a counter miscount they absolutely should have caught, is the same player Slay the Spire was made for. You already know who you are.
Your Turn
Which of these games gave you a run that ended so perfectly — or so painfully — that you immediately started another one, and what game are we criminally missing from this list?
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