The latest trailer for Slay the Spire 2 came with an unexpected surprise. The sequel to everyone’s favourite deckbuilder will have a multiplayer mode when it launches into early access on March 5. I’ve played Slay the Spire for several hundred hours on my phone and PC, and those are rookie numbers. I’ve always thought it would be fun to play Slay the Spire with someone else, mostly because climbing the tower on your own slowly becomes quite a lonely and sometimes grueling experience.
The co-op mode will support up to four players, which already sounds brilliantly chaotic. There are multiplayer-specific cards (neat), as well as what the recently updated Steam page calls ‘powerful team synergies’. But it’s still not clear how the co-op mode is going to be implemented into the game. How do the multiplayer cards work? Do you share resources? Are the team synergies realisable bonuses or just supposed synergies between the different cards? I have no idea, but I’m excited to find out.
How Do You Even Make A Game Like Slay The Spire Co-Op?
The trailer gave no indication of how the multiplayer in Slay the Spire 2 might work, whether it’s a separate mode from standard play, and how the decks, relics, and enemies will be different in co-op. I’m hopeful that this is a standalone mode that is designed for co-operative play rather than the regular mode with slightly stronger enemies. I’ve got no clue how Megacrit is going to handle balancing when you might have one player with an infinite deck just taking ten minutes to finish their turn, for example.
It’s going to be fascinating to see how a meta develops around deck synergies between the different characters. I’ve played around with the Prismatic Shard in the first game (a relic that means cards will appear in draft from any of the available characters), and sometimes you get some truly broken combos that make the use of special cards from different characters. Most of the time, however, the lack of refinement due to the clashing synergies means it’s very difficult to build a functioning deck when you start combining class cards. I’d love to see co-op Slay the Spire 2 handle this differently, but I have no idea how it would work.
There’s every possibility that the co-op mode for Slay The Spire 2 will inherently be the more casual game mode. Rather than climbing up to Ascension 20 and trying to beat the game on the absolute hardest difficulty, co-op might be designed for more laidback play. This is mostly because the idea of balancing Slay the Spire for four characters at once seems like a massive undertaking. While Megacrit has proven its game development chops with many years of free updates for the first game, it all depends whether the team decides co-op mode is worth the focus for the sort of sweeping balance changes that have made Slay the Spire one of the most ‘competitive’ deckbuilders on the market.
I also have no doubt that some concepts for co-op play have been inspired by the Slay the Spire boardgame, which naturally supports multiple players. In the boardgame, enemy health is scaled according to how many players there are, and I imagine it will work similarly in STS2. You also get to discuss which relics everyone should pick when they are rewarded to you, and it seems like that’s exactly how it works in the sequel, too.
All we’d need then is the co-op to be couch co-op rather than just online, and we’d have the perfect Slay the Spire multiplayer experience. Will there be online matchmaking, or can you only play with your friends? I have so many questions, and right now, not many answers.
Slay the Spire II
- Released
-
March, 2026
- ESRB
-
e
- Developer(s)
-
Mega Crit
- Publisher(s)
-
Mega Crit
- Engine
-
Godot
