The Best Roguelike Deckbuilders to Play and Wishlist
Updated August 3, 2026
The best roguelike deckbuilders you can play right now are Slay the Spire, Monster Train 2, Inscryption, and StarVaders: four released, high-craft takes on the same loop of drawing cards, shaping a deck mid-run, and dying a lot. If you want one still in the oven, Hellmate is our chess-based roguelike deckbuilder coming soon to Steam.
I make games for a living, and one of the five below is ours, so treat everything here as design intent rather than a review. The other four are released games I keep coming back to.
Quick list:
- Slay the Spire (MegaCrit, 2019): the genre’s template, and the best first pick.
- Monster Train 2 (Shiny Shoe, 2025): vertical battles, two-faction combos, big payoffs.
- Inscryption (Daniel Mullins Games, 2021): deckbuilding wrapped in a meta-horror mystery.
- StarVaders (Pengonauts, 2025): tactical grid deckbuilding with a rewind button.
- Hellmate (Overbaked, coming soon): a roguelike deckbuilder built on chess.
The same five, side by side:
| Game | Studio | Released | The twist | Steam reviews | PC platforms on Steam |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Slay the Spire | MegaCrit | January 23, 2019 | Three acts, more than 300 cards, relics that stack into run-long buffs | 97.5% positive across 216,959 reviews | Windows, macOS, Linux |
| Monster Train 2 | Shiny Shoe | May 21, 2025 | A vertical battlefield you defend across floors, with two factions fused into one deck | 95.3% positive across 10,012 reviews | Windows, macOS |
| Inscryption | Daniel Mullins Games | October 19, 2021 | A card game that keeps pulling its own frame back to reveal an escape room and a meta-mystery | 96.8% positive across 147,438 reviews | Windows, macOS, Linux |
| StarVaders | Pengonauts | April 30, 2025 | Grid tactics where a card’s position matters as much as its damage, plus a rewind token | 97.1% positive across 4,277 reviews | Windows, macOS |
| Hellmate | Overbaked | Coming soon, ours | Hell chess: a chess piece climbing seven floors themed after the seven deadly sins | Unreleased, ours | Windows, macOS |
Review percentages and counts are Steam user reviews on the US store as of August 2026, and the platform column lists the PC operating systems each Steam page supports, not console availability.
What makes a roguelike deckbuilder worth your time?
A roguelike deckbuilder gives you a small starting deck and asks you to grow it into an engine over a single run, then wipes it when you lose or win. The good ones make every card pickup a real decision, keep runs short enough to restart without pain, and change the map, shops, and enemies each time so no two runs feel the same. The four released games below all clear that bar in different ways.
One name you will notice is missing: Balatro. Its run is about scoring poker hands and bending their rules with jokers, not about growing a combat deck out of nothing, so it sits beside this list rather than in it, and our piece on why deckbuilders are so addictive is the better home for it.
Should you start with Slay the Spire?
Slay the Spire: the one that set the template.
Slay the Spire, released in full in January 2019 by MegaCrit, is the game most others in the genre are measured against. You climb a spire across three acts as one of four characters, with more than 300 cards between them and relics that stack into run-long buffs. Each run reshuffles the map, the shops, and the elite fights, so the deck you finish with is never the deck you planned. If you have never touched the genre, start here.
What is Monster Train 2 like?
Monster Train 2: vertical battles and oversized combos.
Shiny Shoe’s Monster Train 2, released May 21, 2025 and published by Big Fan Games, stacks its battlefield vertically: you defend a pyre across multiple floors while enemies climb toward it. You fuse two of the game’s factions into a single deck, which is where the combos get loud. It launched hot, not that it is finished: Shiny Shoe has kept a content roadmap running since release. Pick this when you want deckbuilding that ends in a satisfying, oversized payoff rather than careful chip damage.
What makes Inscryption different from other deckbuilders?
Inscryption: the deckbuilder that breaks its own frame.
Daniel Mullins Games released Inscryption in October 2021 through Devolver Digital, and Steam players have kept it at 96.8% positive across 147,438 reviews as of August 2026. It starts as a card game played by candlelight against a shadowy opponent, then keeps pulling the frame back to reveal an escape room, a meta-mystery, and several genres bolted underneath. The deckbuilding is sharp on its own, but here it is the vehicle for something stranger. Come for the card game and stay for the moment it stops being one.
What is StarVaders?
StarVaders: tactical roguelike deckbuilding on a grid.
StarVaders, from independent studio Pengonauts and published by Joystick Ventures, launched on Steam on April 30, 2025. It moves the genre onto a grid: you pilot one of three mechs, pick from twelve pilots, and play from a large card pool where a card’s position matters as much as its damage. A Chrono Token system lets you rewind a mistimed move, which softens the usual roguelike sting. If you like runs where the square a card lands on is half the puzzle, this is the one to try.
Hellmate: our chess-based roguelike deckbuilder, coming soon
Hellmate is our own entry, and it is still coming soon, so treat this as a preview rather than a verdict. You play a chess piece trying to cleanse its sins and escape hell by playing what we call hell chess. You build a deck from Spell, Piece, Consumable, and Joker cards, manage mana, and try to eliminate the opposing king in as few turns as possible. The runs climb seven randomly generated floors themed after the seven deadly sins, with a gothic tone closer to Darkest Dungeon or Don’t Starve than to the brighter games above. Its Steam page lists Windows and macOS. You can wishlist Hellmate on Steam if a roguelike deckbuilder built on chess sounds like your kind of trouble.
Why a genre-agnostic studio is building one
Overbaked is a small independent studio in Istanbul, and we do not think of ourselves as a deckbuilder studio or a cozy studio or any single-genre studio. The through-line is the studio, not a single genre. Our other game in progress, the cozy apartment sim Grandma Left Me a Building, is about as far from hell chess as we can get. If you want to see how we approach design across both, our devlog on building Grandma’s world covers it, and there are more under-the-radar indies worth a wishlist in our Steam hidden gems roundup.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best roguelike deckbuilder?
Slay the Spire, if you only play one. Its three acts stay readable while you are still learning what a good card looks like, and every later game in the genre borrows its vocabulary, which makes all of them easier to read afterwards.
Is Balatro a roguelike deckbuilder?
No, not the way this list uses the term. Balatro hands you a standard poker deck and asks you to score hands with jokers, while the games here have you assemble a combat deck from almost nothing. Same addiction, different machine.
What should I play after Slay the Spire?
Monster Train 2 next. It keeps the combat loop but stacks it upward and lets two factions share one deck, so the payoffs get louder. Take Inscryption if you want a story that keeps moving the walls, and StarVaders if you want grid tactics.
Which roguelike deckbuilder should you play first?
Start with Slay the Spire if you are new, because it teaches the grammar every other game riffs on. Jump to Monster Train 2 for combos and speed, Inscryption for story, and StarVaders for tactical grid play. Then wishlist Hellmate if you want to see where a chess-piece-in-hell take on the genre goes next.
