Roguelike Deckbuilders That Aren't Slay the Spire Clones
The short version
Updated August 2026. Every price and review count on this page was read off Steam this month.
If you want one game and no further reading, buy StarVaders. By the test below, Balatro breaks more of the template, three pillars against StarVaders’ two, but it throws out the fight along with everything else. StarVaders is the furthest departure that still plays like a deckbuilder: it keeps the fight and moves it onto a grid. It is also finished, widely played, and readable without a tutorial, which its Steam listing treats as an explicit design goal.
A roguelike deckbuilder is a run-based game where your deck is your character: you start with a weak set of cards, add and remove cards between fights, and one loss wipes the deck and restarts the run.
The rest of this page is a test you can run yourself, which matters because it also works on games this page never names. Monster Train and Roguebook are handled at the bottom, under the near misses, because each of them keeps three of the four pillars.
What a Slay the Spire clone actually is
Four things travel together in the games people call clones, and they are worth naming separately, because a game can copy the art style and break all four, or borrow none of the art and keep all four.
- The node map. You climb a branching route, picking one node at a time, and the route regenerates every run. Slay the Spire’s store page leads with exactly that: the layout is different on every attempt.
- No positioning. Enemies stand in a row facing you. There is no space between you and them, no flanking, no terrain. Every card resolves at the same distance.
- The resetting turn. Energy refills, you draw a fresh hand, the defence you bought expires before your next turn uses it, and the turn you just took is final.
- Relics. Passive modifiers you collect mid-run and never spend. Slay the Spire advertises 200+ discoverable items on that same page.
Break one pillar and you get a variant. Break two and your Spire reflexes start handing you bad advice: you hold a card you should have played, or you buy defence in a game that has no such thing. Every game below breaks at least one, four of them break two, and Loop Hero and Balatro break three. Each entry names its own count. Positioning is the heaviest of the four, so a game that breaks only that one still plays nothing like the template.
| Pillar of the template | What it looks like in Slay the Spire | Games here that break it |
|---|---|---|
| The node map | A branching climb, one node chosen at a time | Loop Hero, Balatro, Into The Grid, Mahokenshi |
| No positioning | A row of enemies at a fixed distance | StarVaders, Fights in Tight Spaces, HELLCARD, Usurper, The Ouroboros King |
| The resetting turn | Energy refills, the hand is thrown away, the turn is final | StarVaders (Chrono Tokens rewind it), Usurper (Power banks up), Into The Grid, Balatro, The Ouroboros King, Loop Hero (no combat turns at all) |
| Relics | Passive items found mid-run, never spent | Loop Hero (gear you swap out), Balatro (Jokers you buy and sell) |
The nine games, and what each one throws out
| Game | Year | Breaks the template by | Price (as of August 2026) | Steam reviews (as of August 2026) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| StarVaders | 2025 | Cards move a mech around a grid, and Chrono Tokens rewind a turn you misread | $24.99 | 4,321 (97.1% positive) |
| Into The Grid | 2025 | A tabletop board to explore, plus a second resource that rescues a bad hand | $14.99 | 220 (85.0% positive) |
| Usurper | 2024 | You win by checkmate, and your King walks forward to deploy cards | $9.99 | 48 (79.2% positive) |
| The Ouroboros King | 2023 | A chessboard, and one piece moved per turn with no hand to empty | $9.99 | 569 (80.3% positive) |
| Mahokenshi | 2023 | The deck pays for travel across an island map as well as for fights | $24.99 | 620 (77.3% positive) |
| Fights in Tight Spaces | 2021 | Cards move your body around a room, and the room itself does damage | $24.99 | 3,921 (90.0% positive) |
| HELLCARD | 2024 | Enemy placement matters, and up to three heroes fight the same board | $24.99 | 4,662 (85.7% positive) |
| Loop Hero | 2021 | You place cards on the world, and the hero fights without you | $14.99 | 36,500 (92.7% positive) |
| Balatro | 2024 | No enemies at all: poker hands score against a target | $14.99 | 197,203 (97.8% positive) |
Review counts are the Steam total, positive and negative together, with the positive share beside it. Loop Hero’s total lands on a round 36,500 by coincidence: 33,844 of those are positive and 2,656 are negative.
Where the board is the real opponent
The largest gap between Slay the Spire and everything else is space. Once a game gives enemies a location, half your card evaluations change: reach, facing and order of operations start to matter more than raw numbers do.
Aliens drop down a grid one row per turn, and your mech has to already be somewhere else when they land. StarVaders breaks two pillars, positioning and the finality of a turn, because Chrono Tokens hand you a rewind that Slay the Spire never offers. Its listing advertises 400+ cards and artifacts across three mechs and twelve pilots, so run variety holds up after the novelty of the grid wears off. This is the one to buy if you only take one game off this page.
Cards are punches, throws and steps in a corridor, and the environment is a weapon you set up two turns in advance. Fights in Tight Spaces breaks positioning and nothing else: the map, the energy and the items all behave themselves. Buy it for space without a fantasy skin. It is still the cleanest expression of a deck that controls your body as well as your damage.
Three heroes can share one board in HELLCARD, solo with computer companions or online with other people, which makes it the only game here you can play with friends. Its store copy states outright that monster placement matters and can be turned against them, a sentence the template has no room for. Its pillar count matches Fights in Tight Spaces: positioning falls, the other three hold.
The node climb is gone in Into The Grid, swapped for a tabletop board you move around, and Virtual Memory arrives as a second resource whose stated job is to make a suboptimal hand usable. That is the interesting half, because the template’s difficulty comes largely from hands you cannot use. Two pillars down, the map and the turn. Buy it knowing the version on sale now is unfinished: Flatline Studios plans more characters, modes and campaigns before 1.0, and it carries the smallest review count on this page. If the board itself is the part you came for, deckbuilders where the grid matters goes further into it.
Buy Mahokenshi only if you specifically want a deck that pays for exploration. Your cards fund movement across the Celestial Islands as well as combat, terrain feeds directly into the tactical decisions, and the island map is the pillar it takes down: there is no branching climb, there is a place to walk. It is also the weakest reviewed of the finished games here, so wait for a sale unless the exploration hook alone sells you.
Where the board is a chessboard
A chess deckbuilder is a game where you play cards onto a chessboard instead of moving a fixed army: cards summon pieces, cast spells or upgrade what is already there, and the deck grows across a run.
This is the sharpest break on offer, because chess replaces the win condition. The target is one piece, and a board full of enemy material can be irrelevant to it.
Your King is a unit in Usurper, and he walks toward the front line to deploy cards. You also bank Power for expensive units like the Queen and the Cannon, so energy stops resetting to the same number every turn, which is the second pillar it breaks after positioning. You win by checkmate, across four factions and thirteen bosses. Its review count is tiny, 48 in total, so buy it if the pitch alone sells you; at that sample size the percentage tells you very little.
If you have never touched a chess variant, start with The Ouroboros King. It asks for no opening theory, runs 15 to 45 minutes, and mixes standard and fairy chess pieces with relics and consumables. You move one piece per turn, so there is no hand to empty, and that is the pillar it breaks hardest alongside positioning: every turn carries a single decision where the template gives you five.
Both games sit in a genre with its own pages here. What a chess deckbuilder is defines the shape, and best chess roguelikes carries the longer list.
Where there is no fight at all
You never play a card at an enemy in Loop Hero. You place terrain, buildings and monsters along a loop, and the hero walks it and fights on his own while you watch. Three pillars go: the map is something you build, gear swaps in and out where relics would sit, and there are no combat turns for you to take at all. It is the right buy for anyone who finds turn-by-turn combat tiring, and the difficulty curve becomes something you author by accident.
Three pillars down as well, and the widest gap on this page: Balatro has no map, no relics in the never-spent sense, since Jokers are bought and sold, and no turn that resets, because a blind hands you a budget of hands and discards to spend as you like. There are no enemies either. You play poker hands against a score target, and Jokers rewrite what scoring even means. It is the most-played game here by a wide margin, and almost nothing transfers from Slay the Spire except the habit of thinning a deck.
Our own game, beside the list
Hellmate, which we are making, sits beside this list. It is roguelike deckbuilding chess across the seven floors of Hell: you summon pieces with mana, brand your army with sigils, and melt a sin’s king before your turns run out. Against the four pillars it breaks one, positioning. It is unreleased, dated 19 January 2027 on Steam, Windows and macOS only, so there is nothing to point at: no scores, no sales, no player numbers.
The near misses
Two games sit just outside this list, and it is worth saying why.
Monster Train gives you three vertical floors to defend while enemies climb toward your pyre, and that geometry is a real change. It is also the smallest escape available: the branching route, the refilling energy and the collectable artifacts all survive intact, so the single pillar it breaks, it breaks gently. Where you drop a unit changes. How far a card reaches does not.
Roguebook swaps the node climb for a hex map you reveal as you go and runs two heroes on one deck, which is more distance than most manage. Its store page also lists 80 relics, so the relic pillar stands and the map is the only one it takes down.
How to check a store page yourself
The screenshots settle this faster than the description does.
- If every combat screenshot shows one row of enemies facing you at the same distance, the positioning pillar is intact, whatever the theme is.
- Search the store description for “position”, “placement”, “grid”, “tile” or “board”. Into The Grid says tabletop board game mechanics in its own copy. HELLCARD says monster placement matters. Those sentences are load-bearing.
- Look for a stated win condition other than reducing health to zero. Checkmate, a score target and a survival timer each break more than a reskinned map does.
- Read the review count as well as the percentage. Usurper’s 79.2% in the table above rests on 48 reviews, which is a far weaker signal than the same percentage across a few thousand.
Quick answers
Is Balatro a Slay the Spire clone?
No. Balatro keeps deck thinning and a run structure, then throws out the map, the enemies, the energy pool and the relics. Scoring poker hands against a blind has almost no overlap with managing block and intent icons.
Is any of these a good first deckbuilder?
Yes, two of them. Balatro asks only that you know what a pair and a flush are, and The Ouroboros King states on its store page that no opening theory is required. Both are cheaper than Slay the Spire: 14.99 and 9.99 USD against its 24.99.
Do any of these play on a real chessboard?
Yes, two. Usurper and The Ouroboros King both put the fight on a chess grid, and both replace the health bar with checkmate.
Are all of these single-player only?
No. HELLCARD supports co-op for up to three heroes, online or with computer companions, and Usurper and The Ouroboros King both list versus modes on Steam. The other six games on this page are single-player.
