The endless online battle of Guild Wars is about to spill over the borders of the MMO genre. Having only just announced Guild Wars 3 earlier this month, ArenaNet and its parent NC has revealed that it's also taking the series into an entirely new genre, through an official Guild Wars card game called Mistbound.

Mistbound is licensed by ArenaNet and developed by NC with the involvement of bilibili—the Chinese equivalent of YouTube.

"We felt it was time to give Guild Wars fans a new way to play together, inspired by the card game roots of the franchise, where they could compete in a competitive PvP arena in a CCG game space," said ArenaNet studio head Colin Johanson in a statement. "Having all those experiences they love of the characters and creatures and the sounds of the world of Tyria brought to life in CCG."

By "card game roots" Johanson is referring to the fact that Guild Wars was inspired by Magic: The Gathering, specifically in how character attributes can be modified to create bespoke builds. Mistbound's twist on the digital CCG formula is basically to give you cards that can move around. Its key feature is a dynamic 5x3 tactical grid where units and commanders—which are deployed as cards—can then reposition turn-by-turn in response to enemy movement.

Apparently, this system—which NC calls "dynamic movement gameplay" is intended to make the inherent complexity of a card game like Magic a bit more intuitive.

"One challenge with pursuing deep strategic combinations in card games is that the cards themselves can easily become overly complex,” said Mistbound producer Hwang Sunwoo. "Rather than placing that complexity on individual cards, we wanted to express it through the battlefield."

During battle, players will be able to exploit numerous mechanics like knockbacks, pulls and flanking. Alongside standard units, familiar Guild Wars characters can step onto the battlefield as commanders, bringing unique abilities and tactics for you to take advantage of. You can also expect a soundtrack with contributions from Guild Wars' original musicians, and voice performances for all those Guild Wars regulars.

The bilibili angle of this seems to be on the community development side. The press release says that development of Mistbound is being guided not just by the developers' design knowhow but by "direct, high-quality player input". I also imagine NC is looking to build an audience for Mistbound out of the game, possibly with a mind to the game becoming an esport a-la Hearthstone.

There's no release date for Mistbound as yet, but I doubt this will launch much before the end of the year, and we're most likely to see it sometime in 2027.

Spider-Man has starred in plenty of classic and a few not-so-classic story arcs, and Magic's Spider-Man set used a bunch of those as the basis for its saga cards. You drop a card like The Death of Gwen Stacy, Kraven's Last Hunt, or The Clone Saga (I did say some of them were not-so-classic) and every comic-book reader at the table knows what the deal is.

The upcoming Marvel Super Heroes set gets to draw from an even broader run of event comics, with saga cards like World War Hulk, The Coming of Galactus, and this one: The Super Hero Civil War.

I love that this card lets you take over other player's characters and then you can make them fight for absolutely no reason. Basically, when you play this card, for the next three turns you get to be Mark Millar in 2006.

Meanwhile, the World War Hulk saga card lets you play a red or green creature for free, then put three +1/+1 counters on a creature, and on the final turn double a creature's power and toughness, and give it trample. It's an easy way to bring out your Hulk, then make him as mad as he's ever been.

The Coming of Galactus ends even more apocalyptically. If your opponent doesn't stop it by turn three, it brings out Galactus as a legendary 16/16 with flying and trample who destroys a land every time he attacks. He does eat planets, after all.

As more cards are revealed, it'll be interesting to see how they handle other big Marvel events. Secret Wars and One World Under Doom, maybe? Doctor Doom is getting his own Commander pre-con. We'll see when the Marvel Super Heroes set comes out on June 26.

As part of a talk highlighted in the 2026 GDC Trends Report, Playstack head of discovery Patrick Johnson explained how the indie publisher got in on the ground floor with PCG's 2024 game of the year, Balatro. There's no shortcut or sexy secret, though, just putting in boring work with a dose of good old-fashioned stick-toitiveness.

"One thing that we do at Playstack is we scout," said Johnson. "We look at games across all sorts of platforms. Part of my job is looking at every game that goes up on Steam every day, if that’s possible.

"I start in the morning, and I’ll look through all of the games that have just gone up. That’s how we first came across games like Balatro. I saw the game the day it went up on Steam."

This would have been around May or June 2023 according to Balatro dev LocalThunk's own development timeline for the game. According to Johnson, Playstack was still bullish on Steam wishlists as an indicator of a game's potential sales and popularity, which makes its decision to support Balatro all the more surprising⁠—it was a complete unknown. "I don’t think we believe they’re quite as important as they used to be," Johnson said of Steam wishlists.

"Balatro came through on Steam, and it didn’t have many followers to begin with. It didn’t have many wishlists on the platform. But it looked interesting. We thought, ‘That’s a cool-looking game. We should reach out and just try it.’

"I went to Twitter at the time and contacted LocalThunk. I think he had maybe two or three followers at the time on the platform."

Going by LocalThunk's recollections, this was a pivotal moment for him and the game. "I got a DM on Twitter from a scout at Playstack, my eventual publisher," LocalThunk wrote. "I was super excited, but this also complicated things. This was a very tumultuous time in the history of the game because I was in limbo between 'Nothing will come of this game and I want to move on with my life' and 'What if I could do this as a job?'"

Someone else might have spotted Balatro's potential and lent LocalThunk the resources and reach to quit his job and turn the game into a phenomenon, but that's far from a guarantee. In this instance, no amount of discovery algorithms or manual curation could have substituted for Johnson just tanking the firehose of new games on Steam whenever he had the time. That busywork changed LocalThunk's life and allowed our eventual 2024 game of the year to find an audience.

"We were in there really early. And I think that made the key difference," said Johnson. "Obviously, I’d like to think we were a great partner for the game, but just the speed at which we could move out was very important for that time.”

In other news about Playstack, the publisher appears to have received an offer it can't refuse from Integrated Media Company, a subsidiary of the private equity group TPG that owns the likes of Fandom, GameSpot, Curse, and TV Guide. Playstack's current owner, TrueFin, is seeking approval of a $151 million deal to sell its majority stake to IMC.

Magic's mini-sets called Secret Lairs, which are usually short-run reprints of old cards with new art aimed at collectors, have really been leaning into the joke over the last couple of years. The cards starring Dwight from The Office were a perfect example, and the upcoming Secret Lair called Cats are the Best seems like another, including as it does 15 Garfield cards to slide into your Commander decks to the bafflement of your friends.

The cards come in three "drops" of five, with the first based on the question: What if some of the original Magic: The Gathering cards created by Richard Garfield were reinterpreted with panels from the other famous Garfield instead? And so classics like Swords to Plowshares and Counterspell are no accompanied by panels where Garfield pushes Odie off a table or slaps Jon in the face.

The Motivationally Challenged drop takes workplace motivational posters as the other half of its inspiration, reskinning Ponder as Hang in There and Beast Within as I Hate Mondays. Things get real weird in the third drop, called Our Only Thought is to Entertain You, which lets the artists cut loose and reinterpret Garfield in more psychedelic styles for cards like Molten Collapse and Maddening Hex.

Given how often games of Magic involve people bringing their homemade alters that swap the official card images for horny manga art or whatever, I'm all for giving people an official way to rock up to a Tuesday night game with a card where everyone's favorite lasagna freak is an Eldrazi.

Garfield comes to Secret Lair as part of the Cats are the Best superdrop, which goes live at 9am PT on June 15. You can sign up for an alert at the Secret Lair website to try to get in before they sell out.

There's a quiz on the Secrets of Strixhaven site to figure out which of the magical university's colleges you belong to. Ignore that traumatic memory of the time every millennial was telling us they were Hufflepuff. It's a heads-up that this set's focus is on differentiating those colleges, making the factions even more important than they were in the first Strixhaven set. I'm Silverquill, apparently.

Each college isn't just a pair of colors, it's also a signature mechanic. Witherbloom (green/black) is the college where they study life and death—they're half hippy, half goth—and so Infusion is triggered whenever you gain life. It can have a variety of effects, like Poisoner's Apprentice giving someone unlucky -4/-4 when it enters. But again, only if you already gained life that turn, making it a fun play for your second main phase after weakening someone in combat.

The artsy theatre kids of Prismari college (red/blue) have a mechanic called Opus that likewise has different effects, but always the same trigger. In this case it's casting an instant or sorcery spell, with the twist that the effect is more powerful if you set it off by casting something worth five or more mana. The more dramatic your performance, the more powerful your magic.

Their studious opposites are the math geeks of Quandrix college (blue/green), whose keyword is Increment. It appears on creatures and means any time you cast a spell with a mana cost higher than that creature's power or toughness, it gets a +1/+1 counter. If you're the kind of person who wants Magic to have even more math than it already does, Quandrix is the college for you.

Lorehold (red/white) is the history college, and so their mechanic isn't new, but rather dug up from Magic's past. Flashback goes all the way back to Odyssey from 2001, though it's reappeared several times since. Cards with Flashback can be cast from the graveyard, though usually at a higher cost, as if being unearthed with arcane archaeology. Which is Lorehold's whole deal.

The word wizards of Silverquill (white/black) have abilities labeled Repartee, and it's another one with varied effects but the same trigger. In this case, it's casting an instant or sorcery spell that targets a creature. (Like the original Strixhaven, this set is one where instants and sorceries matter, to play up that real "we're casting spells" vibe rather than the "we're controlling armies of little guys" vibe Magic often becomes.) Multiple Repartee effects might go off at once, giving that authentic feeling of being swarmed by a mob of keyboard warriors because you misspoke.

Huh, maybe I don't want to be Silverquill after all. Is Witherbloom still accepting applicants? Secrets of Strixhaven arrives in Arena on April 21, and in tabletop Magic on April 24.

Slay the Spire 2 has quietly been one of the most-played games on Steam since it launched in March. Even in early access, it's a bigger game than the original (both in terms of popularity and content), but it's far from done. Among the incoming additions teased in developer Mega Crit's latest update are:

• Alternate versions of Acts 2 and 3 (the first act already has two forms, Overgrowth and Underdocks)
• Steam Workshop support
• "Experimental game modes"
• A new character
• New "cards, events, relics, and potions"
• And, eventually, "true victory" and "everything that comes with it"

That's on top of the expected bug fixes, refined audio and artwork, balance tweaks, additional languages, and more. The only things missing from the roadmap are dates, which the studio says are just not its style.

"You might see this and think, but where are the dates! Why can't you promise dates??" writes Mega Crit co-founder Casey Yano. "My response is: It's not what works for us.

"Mega Crit is a small team where each member understands their responsibilities, knows everyone else, and I try my best to ensure that we work at a healthy pace. We evaluate our tasks each week and work on what feels most impactful. It's not the most organized method, but this allows spontaneous experimentation like the dialogues you have with the Ancients or the existence of a Room Full of Cheese. We won't massively expand the size of the studio to finish the game faster. Exacting deadlines produce sloppy uninspired work and I don't want Sloppy Spire 2, I want Slay the Spire 2."

I also don't want Sloppy Spire 2, so I will patiently wait for Slay the Spire 2. Yano notes, however, that players can opt into the game's beta branch to try out experimental changes early and provide feedback—something they got a lot of recently after some controversial balance changes.

Those balance changes made it to the main Slay the Spire 2 branch yesterday in the game's first "Major Update." (Something I had not noticed when I wondered when they were coming in an earlier version of this article!)

In that Q&A section, Yano also reveals the one thing Slay The Spire 2's developers refuse to compromise on above all: "There must be whimsy." You can read the full newsletter on Steam.

I can't confirm it, but I'm starting to get the distinct impression that someone at Wizards of the Coast has a vendetta against my wallet in particular. First came the announcement of Magic: The Gathering's ill-fated Monster Hunter x Secret Lair drop, a limited edition set that preyed directly on my weaknesses as a MonHun sicko and cool lizard art enthusiast but was mercifully taken back to the drawing board after its arbitrary card pairings left the internet unimpressed.

After today's announcement, however, my suspicions that I'm dead center in WotC's sights are hard to overlook. Because Wizards of the Coast just announced that Dwarf Fortress is coming to Magic: The Gathering.

The DF x MTG collab comes as part of Secret Lair's Back to School superdrop, a cluster of limited edition crossover sets "featuring friendship, fantasy, doodles, drama, and reading material with a nonzero chance of magical side effects." Other sets include My Little Pony, Strixhaven reimagined as an anime high school AU, and a quartet of creatures drawn in notebook sketch style.

Those other drops have lovely art of their own, but the Dwarf Fortress set is taking its own tack by bringing MTG its first ASCII card art. Its five cards' illustrations feature the text glyph art style of classic Dwarf Fortress, their mountainhome hallways, dwarves, and dangers rendered with all the timeless beauty offered by IBM Code Page 437.

To the uninitiated, the illustrations might be difficult to parse. But as someone who first started playing classic Dwarf Fortress half my lifetime ago, these are images that vibrate with mythic potency: In one, a trapped dwarf suffers the predations of a vampiric Ñ. In another, a capital D unleashes its ruinous dragonfire on a troop of fortress defenders.

My favorite might be the set's take on Communal Brewing, showing the beating heart of every fortress: the dining hall where the ☺s of the mountainfolk eat, drink, and mingle in dwarven camaraderie.

While there's no shortage of Dwarf Fortress scenarios that could easily be represented with a traditional MTG illustration, I think the ASCII art was an excellent choice: It's a striking look, it's a fun homage to Dwarf Fortress history, and—I suspect—it'll look sick on a physical card. Hypothetically. Not that I'm going to give WotC the satisfaction.

If you'd like to test that hypothesis yourself, the Secret Lair x Dwarf Fortress: Create New World set will be available to order on April 27 at the Secret Lair site. In the meantime, I'll be imagining how cool a Qud set would look, too.

Five years ago, Strixhaven: School of Mages showed us Magic: The Gathering's original take on the wizard school genre, which covers everything from Discworld's Unseen University to A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin—though obviously Harry Potter is the elephant in the room.

Back then, Wizards of the Coast hadn't gone all-in on the crossovers. Now we've had everything from a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles set to a limited run featuring Dwight from The Office. It was reasonable to wonder, after Wizards of the Coast's corporate owner Hasbro announced a partnership with Warner Bros to "bring the Harry Potter universe to life through licensed toys and games," whether that meant Magic would be one of the vehicles for that exercise in cross-branding synergy, or whatever the executives call it these days.

But no. Instead, Magic is returning to its own setting for Secrets of Strixhaven, a sequel set that checks in on the students and faculty several years and one multiversal war later to see how they're doing. And, though I've enjoyed Magic's crossovers like Middle-earth and Warhammer 40,000, I'm glad they're taking a break from them this time.

Strixhaven has a lot to recommend it over Hogwarts. For starters, it teaches subjects other than magic. While your history professor might summon a ghost to deliver a guest lecture on events they lived through and your biology teacher might be an actual druid, Strixhaven's classes include mundane subjects from art to zoology. You're going to come out more rounded than someone who has expertise in Defense Against the Dark Arts and Potions but has never taken a math class in their life.

It's also a university rather than a high school. The student wizards are all young adults rather than mostly children, which makes the fact they end up in exciting magical peril on the regular a bit more OK. After book after book of the Hogwarts staff pushing their students into life-or-death situations, it's difficult to see Dumbledore as a kindly old avuncular fuddy-duddy, rather than an incompetent liability who should have been fired years ago.

The age difference also makes the five colleges, Strixhaven's equivalent of Harry Potter's houses, seem less cruel. Each college represents a broad field of study, like Prismari's focus on using elemental magic to enhance the visual and performing arts, and importantly they're chosen by the students themselves at the start of their second year rather than being personality designations arbitrarily assigned by one magical bonnet.

There's no quidditch either, and the equivalent sport of mage tower, which is about playing keepaway with your opponent's mascot, has a scoring system that isn't paper-thin absurdity. But at this point I'm nitpicking. Really, the reason Strixhaven is a more fun take on magical school tropes is that it's self-aware enough to make fun of the whole idea.

When you start reading Harry Potter it feels like a parody of the British boarding school system, something close in spirit to the brilliant assassin school bit in Terry Pratchett's Pyramids, but the longer the series goes on the more obvious it becomes that Harry Potter is actually a celebration of boarding school nonsense—it just read like parody because it seems unthinkable someone could be in favor of separating children from their families to make them undergo an authoritarian proving ground to prepare them for the class system.

The fact Strixhaven wasn't created by a transphobic nutbar is really just a bonus. Secrets of Strixhaven will be available in Arena from April 21, and on tabletops from April 24.

Slay the Spire 2 is getting badges—not the ones you get on Steam, but not entirely different, either. In the notes for a new beta patch, developer Mega Crit said badges are a bit like achievements, in that they let you know about the cool things you accomplished during your run.

"Badges may appear at the end of a run, noting various things that happened during a run like defeating a boss without losing HP, beating the game quickly, specific easter eggs, or pointing out that you forgot to spend your gold," the studio explained. "They're meant as little reminders to let you know what was unique about each adventure."

For now badges will only appear at the end of a run, but Mega Crit plans to have them also appear in your run history and stats screen at some point in the future. The intent, the studio said, is "to make runs feel distinct and improve scoring," something it will share more on later—although, notably, the patch notes further down also state that this update has "adjusted and added placeholder assets for score lines in run summary and game over screen."

The addition of badges is the top-line thing, but there's quite a bit more going. Map generation via Ascension, the Blade of Ink and Borrowed Time cards, and Doormaker's Grasp have all been adjusted, and numerous smaller balance changes are also in place.

There's also "new art additions for various cards and a few enemies, as well as some cool new VFX for afflictions!"

So far, the response seems fairly positive—or at least, not hugely negative. The previous beta balance patch sparked a massive backlash from players that resulted in nearly 9,800 negative reviews in one day. Mega Crit co-founder Casey Yano said he wasn't bothered by the review bombing because he understands that players are simply "trying to interact with the game and be heard" using the tools they have at hand, but even so, that kind of forcefully negative response has to be a little rough.

There's been a surge in negative reviews in the wake of this balance patch too, but not nearly as ferocious: 801 negative reviews posted so far today, compared to 817 positive. That's still not a great balance, but it's a lot better than the last time around.

As the name implies, this is a beta patch, so if you want it you'll have to be running the game's beta branch: To access that, right-click Slay the Spire 2 in your Steam library, select "Game version and betas" from the menu, and then the public beta branch. The full patch notes are below.

CONTENT

• General:
  
  • Reworked Ascension 6 from Gloom - "Less rest sites." -> Inflation - "Removing cards from your deck at the Merchant is more expensive."
    
• 
  As mentioned last week, affecting map generation through Ascension has increasingly seemed to be a miss. It's often too hard to tell what change if any is a result of Ascension, or if it was just an unlucky map generation. Instead Ascension 6 will now make card removal at the Merchant start at 100 Gold, and will increase in price by 50 gold per removal instead of 25. I expect this to be felt significantly more than the old Gloom modifier.
  
  Silent:
  
  • Reworked Blade of Ink card: "Rare - Cost 1 - Skill | This turn, whenever you play an Attack, gain 2(3) Strength this turn." -> "Rare - Cost 1 - Skill - Add 2(3) Inky Shivs into your Hand."
    
    • Added new Inky enchantment: "This card deals 2 additional damage and applies 1 Weak."
      
  • 
    
• 
  The Blade of Ink rework is an experiment with generating Enchanted cards mid combat. Definitely let us know how this feels or if Enchantments are best left to things like Events and Relics. I suspect this card will be high impact, and gives Silent another strong Weak applier.
  
  Necrobinder:
  
  • Reworked Borrowed Time card: "Uncommon - Cost 0 - Skill | Apply 3 Doom to yourself. Gain 1(2) Energy." -> "Uncommon - Cost 1 - Skill | Gain 4(6) energy. Cards cost an additional energy this turn."
    
• 
  This new Borrowed Time should go particularly well with high cost cards like Reap and Bury and help to flesh out other ways to play Necrobinder.
  
  Enemies:
  
  • Reworked Doormaker Grasp turn and power: now attacks for 20(23) and the power is reworked to "Whenever you play a card, lose 1 energy."
    
• 
  Doormaker's Grasp turn was too underwhelming, and overall lowered the difficulty of the fight too much. This new version should make the entire fight high stakes and actually give the player a difficult problem to puzzle over turn to turn instead of making the fight about just living until turn 4.

BALANCE

• Silent:
  
  • Buffed Leading Strike:
    
    • Shivs increased from 1 -> 2
      
    • Damage decreased from 7 -> 3
      
  • 
    
  • Nerfed Speedster: damage decreased from 2(3) -> 1(2)
    
  • Nerfed Untouchable: Block decreased from 7(9) -> 6(8)
    
• 
  Potions & Relics:
  
  • Changed History Course relic: when it plays a copy of an X-cost card, it now uses your current energy for its X-value instead of the energy spent the last time the card was played. Note: It still plays the copy for free
    
• 
  Enemies:
  
  • Buffed Skulking Colony:
    
    • Now attacks on all turns
      
    • Deals slightly more damage
      
  • 
    
• 
  Ancients:
  
  • Buffed Nonupeipe's Fur Coat relic: now affects restocked Axebots and other enemies that enter combat during a fight
    
• 
  Events:
  
  • Nerfed Hungry For Mushrooms event: Fragrant Mushroom option upgraded cards decreased from 3 -> 2
    
  • Changed Waterlogged Scriptorium event:
    
    • Prickly Sponge option gold cost lowered from 155 -> 99
      
    • Tentacle Quill gold cost lowered from 65 -> 55
      
  • 
    
  • Buffed Whispering Hollow event: Exchange option gold cost decreased from 50 -> 35+-9

ART

• Added portrait art for the following cards:
  
  • Hotfix
    
  • Modded
    
  • Synthesis
    
  • Sweeping Gaze
    
• Added new art for Ruby Raiders
  
• Added background art and VFX for Vantom boss fight
  
• Added new visuals for the following afflictions:
  
  • Bound
    
  • Entangled
    
  • Galvanized
    
  • Hexed
    
  • Ringing
    
  • Smog
    
• Updated empty chest VFX, smoke puffs

USER INTERFACE & EXPERIENCE

• General:
  
  • Adjusted and added placeholder assets for score lines in run summary and game over screen
    
  • Adjusted timings and pauses for dialogue for Gremlin Merc
    
  • Adjusted Cultist "Cacaw" dialogue timings
    
  • Adjusted speech bubble positions for Damp and Calcified Cultists
    
  • All monsters now have distinct speech bubble colors
    
  • Players can now navigate between cards/potions/relics in the Timeline unlock screen on controller
    
  • Players can now navigate to the top bar character portrait to see the Ascension hovertip on controller
    
  • Pressing the top bar shortcut while already focusing on a top bar element now moves your controller focus back into your hand
    
• 
  Multiplayer:
  
  • Better handling of intermittent Steam errors
    
  • Disabled skipping chests in multiplayer. Too many people thought it was the Proceed button.
    

WRITING

• General:
  
  • Foul Potion description now specifies that it deals damage to "ALL players and enemies" instead of "EVERYONE", making it clearer that it does not hit Osty
    
  • Fixed wording in the Statistics Total Playtime/Fastest win hovertip
    
• 
  Localization:
  
  • Updated translations for various languages
    
  • Fixed translation errors in the following languages:
    
    • German
      
    • Japanese
      
    • Italian
      
    • Spanish
      
    • Thai
      
    • Polish

BUG FIXES

• General:
  
  • Fixed broken Steam rich presence translations
    
  • Fixed a crash that could occur on startup after a Steam Cloud sync conflict
    
  • Fixed a crash that could occur when the game failed to start and tried to show an error dialog
    
  • Fixed an issue where numbers were improperly formatted on the victory screen
    
  • If there is an error while spawning a creature into combat, a placeholder is shown instead of softlocking the combat
    
  • Fixed softlock caused by being able to use your controller to confirm a hand card selection while you are peeking
    
  • Fixed being able to press down arrow to controller navigate the card grid while an upgrade/remove/transform preview is up
    
  • Vulkan is now defaulted to on Intel iGPUs with known D3D12 stability issues
    
• 
  Ironclad:
  
  • Fixed softlock when selecting a card to upgrade via Armaments card while Lethality power still applies
    
• 
  Silent:
  
  • Fixed Bullet Time card getting played by Mayhem power not setting the cost of the cards in your hand to 0
    
• 
  Potions & Relics:
  
  • Fixed Unsettling Lamp relic doubling the Strength you get from Dominate card
    
  • If a potion is discarded just before combat ends, it's no longer forever unusable
    
  • When clicking a potion that can be thrown at all enemies simultaneously, the potion popup now properly says "Throw" instead of "Drink"
    
• 
  Enemies:
  
  • Fixed an issue where a few enemies' damage intents were occasionally showing the wrong number
    
  • Fixed not being able to navigate from the relic inventory back to the combat in the Mysterious Knight fight on controller
    
  • Removed broken text from Thieving Hopper enemy's Escape Artist power hovertip when playing in Polish
    
  • Fixed Soul Nexus animation not playing correctly
    
• 
  Ancients:
  
  • Removed the peek button from the card selection via Neow's Hefty Tablet relic
    
  • Effects that occur before your turn now interact correctly with Vakuu's Whispering Earring relic
    
  • Fixed Vakuu's Whispering Earring relic continuing to play cards after Void Form power ended the turn
    
  • Fixed an issue where Vakuu's Lord's Parasol relic would occasionally only obtain some of the items that the Merchant sells
    
  • Fixed being able to end the Lord's Parasol purchase animation on controller
    
• 
  Events:
  
  • Fixed an issue where, if the player visited a combat-style event without actually starting a combat (i.e. choosing "Return the Key" at The Lantern Key event) and then visited the Merchant immediately after, throwing a Foul Potion at the Merchant would not grant the player any gold
    
• 
  Multiplayer:
  
  • Trash to Treasure power no longer procs from other player's generated statuses
    
  • Fixed softlock in Thieving Hopper fight if one person is dead when it tries to steal cards
    
  • Fixed state divergence related to Driftwood and Dream Catcher relics
    
  • Player name is now correctly displayed when hovering over your character
    
  • When re-entering the multiplayer host screen, the Ascension is now correctly synced
    
  • You can now reload after saving a game at a rewards screen with non-standard rewards

Last month, Slay the Spire 2's controversial first beta balance patch inspired a massive backlash from its Steam reviewers, drawing over 9,000 negative reviews in the following 24 hours. In an interview with PC Gamer, Mega Crit co-founder Casey Yano said the intensity of the feedback rattled some of the studio's newer developers—but he wasn't shaken by it.

Instead, Yano said he understands the motivating impulse behind the flood of harsh Steam reviews, even if it was "unfortunate" that the tone of the feedback suffered from regional restrictions on online activity—and the nature of Steam reviews themselves.

"It's difficult for players to feel like they're heard by developers, so I understand why they choose to use Steam and do something that would impact visibility in the store to try to portray their feedback," Yano said. "I don't really get mad at players for doing bandwagoning stuff."

As the review bombardment intensified, reactions online were quick to judge its negative reviewers—the majority of which were writing their reviews in Simplified Chinese—for failing to use the Steam discussion forums or the feedback channel in Mega Crit's official Discord. In China, however, those alternate venues for offering feedback are hampered by restrictions on internet activity.

Despite the general assumption that users in China are forced to use the stripped-down Steam China platform unless they use a VPN, reports from players in China indicate that the global version of Steam is usable within the country—for some, at least. Its community features, however, are not. As a result, Steam reviews are the only direct method users in China have to offer their feedback without circumventing platform restrictions.

"I think it's really easy, if you're a player in America, to be like, 'Why don't they just use these systems?'" Yano said. "I don't really feel that way. It's unfortunate that they feel the only way to be heard is through Steam reviews."

Rather than trying to respond to the tone and intensity of the beta patch's feedback, Yano said Mega Crit is more interested in improving lines of communication with Slay the Spire 2 players in China.

"We're all just people, and we all have different restrictions. I don't like to say things like 'Chinese players.' In my mind, I think 'players in China,' because they're just in a different place," Yano said. "They're all just humans. They're all trying to interact with the game and be heard. Being heard is so important, and we want to improve that."

Yano said Slay the Spire 2's Chinese audience was, fundamentally, sharing the same feedback as its English-speaking players—they were just using a different mechanism, voluntarily or not, for communicating it. Ideally, he hopes Mega Crit can find a way to make those mechanisms more productive for all its players.

"Hopefully we can both react to the things that people like and make sure they're happy with the chances, and also try to improve the way we walk to each other," Yano said. "That's how I feel about it."

Ultimately, Yano said Steam reviews—and the culture around reviews more broadly—is an imperfect medium that encourages us to oversimplify how we feel about the games we're playing.

"It's just one blanket. It's one-to-five stars, or you like it or don't like it," he said. "There's many things you like and don't like about everything. And I think that nuance is extremely important."

In an interview with PC Gamer, Mega Crit co-founder Casey Yano shared three mysterious plans for new modes that Slay the Spire 2 could see during the next year or two of planned early access development.

The roguelike card game is already bigger than its predecessor—the co-op mode alone is a major addition for what is primarily a singleplayer genre—but it sounds like Mega Crit will be running at least a few mad science experiments to see whether they pay off.

"There are three specific things that I have in mind, which I'll try to explain in a vague way to not give away too much," Yano said.

"The first one is a mode that is meant for people who want to play in a very competitive fashion. The second is for people who want to have the Slay the Spire experience, but do not have the time to do so. And the third is 'What if there were other ways to interact with people, socially or in a multiplayer-like setting, with the current systems that exist today?'"

So what could each of these ideas be?

Slay the Spire 2, like the first game, already features a daily seeded challenge mode, with a leaderboard that logs players' performances. Perhaps this new mode will pair players together for daily runs? Or consider this left-field theory: two players climb the same tower at once, and if their paths converge they have to duke it out.

The sped-up StS experience sounds like a challenge mode that would either condense the experience as a whole or hand you a specific build—or perhaps allow you to pre-select one from your unlocked cards and relics—and then throw you into a series of battles, with no choices to make in between.

And for the third mode concept? Maybe you could drop into someone else's game, Dark Souls-style, just to help them defeat a boss? I'm not sure that jibes with the "current systems that exist today" constraint, but it could be pretty cool.

It's also possible none of these modes ever end up in players' hands. "Not many of our ideas survive the process," said Yano, speaking generally about the studio's open-ended ideation.

"Those are the three ways to interact with Slay the Spire that don't exist right now," Yano said. "Maybe we'll find a way to do that, or maybe having those modes dilutes the core experience and might not make it at all. That's something we need to try to find out."

But it's also possible Mega Crit comes up with something Yano hasn't even mentioned, because co-founder Anthony Giovanetti has just as much input into design.

"I have thoughts, but even Anthony doesn't know what those thoughts are," Yano said later in the interview, specifically around new characters that could be added to Slay the Spire 2. "We're kind of competitive when it comes to the design."

That approach has worked out so far: Slay the Spire 2 has had the most successful launch of any deckbuilder, ever, and it's not even close.

Watch the full interview video above on the PC Gamer YouTube channel, if you prefer.

There are many goofy placeholders across Slay the Spire 2, MS Paint-style art pieces that stand in for the finished products that will come later as development progresses through Early Access, which Mega Crit says the game might take between one or two years.

The deckbuilder's ending is one of the biggest temporary pieces, with all runs culminating in a cutscene with a mysterious figure called The Architect, presumably the designer of the spire. The Architect exhibits indifference to your appearance at the end of Act 3, shrugging off damage before insta-killing you. An end screen then displays the aggregate damage players have dealt to The Architect, which now totals more than 99 billion. It's all very "To be continued..." in presentation.

Speaking with Mega Crit co-founder Casey Yano about what form the eventual ending to Slay the Spire 2 will take, the studio understandably isn't revealing narrative details, but did provide some thoughts on its process and timing.

"I do want there to be a better ending," Yano tells me over a video call. "I do want it to be more extravagant when you win. And I do want the showdown to also be a pretty big deal, we'll say."

Yano says that the ending(s—he used both singular and plural when speaking to me) aren't completely set in stone, and adds that he deliberately wanted them to be shaped by players' responses to the initial launch.

"I do want the endings to be pretty, pretty serious business, but they aren't too designed at this time. I wanted to see the reaction that people have towards the narrative elements to the game that we've brought in. I like to read what people's theories are on what the characters are, if they're good or bad, and things like that. And so we're kind of just seeing what people like, what characters people are attached to. And while we do have kind of like a canonical idea of what is going to happen, we do make minor tweaks to make sure that the ending kind of meets everyone's expectations, and also a little curveball, you know, every now and then, but positive curveballs."

The first Slay the Spire culminated in Act 4, which players had to unlock by completing Act 3 with all three characters. Players then had to collect three keys as they progressed on new runs, opening a new path to a challenging miniboss that preceded the true final boss of Slay the Spire, The Corrupt Heart. Though Slay the Spire 2 inherits many aspects from the first game, it's unclear whether the sequel will adopt this same structure.

Fittingly, Yano suggests that an updated ending might be one of the later things to be added to Slay the Spire 2. "I get the feeling it's going to take a good while for the ending to show up, just because, you know, we have a few other types of content that we want to make. We want these alternative acts and the characters, we want to experiment with the game modes. I think once those are done, we'll probably think about finalizing an ending, probably as we go into V1."

Other roguelikes have taken the approach of adding an ending later in development, notably Hades and Hades 2.

Slay the Spire 2 has been raking in the dough and enjoying all sorts of positive feedback, but the precarious thing about making something people love is that the minute you change it, you're messing with that thing people love. Developer Mega Crit experienced this last week when its first balance changes incurred the collective wrath of thousands of negative Steam reviews.

If you missed the skinny, there's a card called Prepared which costs zero energy and lets you discard one card to draw another. A beta branch patch changed Prepared to Prepare, a one-cost card which discards two cards to gain two energy on the next turn. It's a big change and a nerf to a useful card.

There is some region-specific nuance to why a review bomb followed—many of the negative reviews were in Simplified Chinese and Steam users in China don't have access to certain features where they'd normally be able to leave feedback—but it's clear players of all nationalities were not happy.

Mega Crit responded to the drama with an X post on March 20. "Since we have a lot of new players that weren’t around for StS1’s Early Access phase and players who are new to Early Access games in general, we wanted to explain our patching methodology a bit," the studio said. "This beta balance pass was the first of many to come over the next 1-2 years … this progress will not be linear, and no change is necessarily permanent."

Mega Crit also said that "feedback we receive via the in-game reporter from players who are testing the patch firsthand is the most useful to us," perhaps to gently push back on the review bombing, and clarified that the beta branch is there in part to get a feel for "experimental changes." Mega Crit also explained that the reasoning behind any change comes down to "a mix of player feedback, collected metrics, and our own design philosophies."

It's a rough reception for the game's self-billed "first BIG post-launch patch," but as Mega Crit pointed out, nothing is set in stone just yet.

Just four months after it was announced, Vampire Crawlers, the Vampire Survivors-spinoff card game described by PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon as "Wolverine for your social calendar," has a release date. Developer Poncle announced today that the new high-speed time sink will go live on April 21, and will carry a price tag of $10.

First things first: What exactly does "Wolverine for your social calendar" even mean? That it's a real danger to your free time, basically. Wes teed up Vampire Crawlers' Next Fest demo in February, intending to take it for a "brief spin," and ended up blowing two solid hours on it.

"Sure, it looks a bit frivolous. And in terms of head-scratching strategy, Vampire Crawlers does still seem to fall on the light end of the deckbuilder spectrum," he wrote of his experience, "But just like Vampire Survivors, I suspect that's what will make it so dangerous. Just one more run, right? How long could it take?"

That sounds pretty promising, and Poncle said the full release will feature "more cards, more places to crawl, and more hours to say goodbye to!"

Vampire Crawlers will be available for PC on Steam on April 21, and if you're curious but not convinced, the demo is still available so you can get a taste before you fully commit. It's also coming to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch on the same day—April 21, remember—and will follow on mobile devices later in the year.

It can be tricky to pull off a sequel, especially when you're talking about a sequel to one of the most celebrated deckbuilding roguelikes around. Slay the Spire 2 might be the result of a coin flip, but it sure seems to be resonating—a Steam community blog post from developer Mega Crit has served up some details about how it's doing.

Perhaps the most impressive of these details is that Slay the Spire 2 sold 3 million copies just a week after launch, with 25 million runs already done and dusted. A note in the post states that the second figure is missing "at least a few million," so it seems safe to conclude that the game isn't just going straight into everyone's backlogs.

"The response to Early Access has been incredible," said Mega Crit co-founder Casey Yano. "Even though I threw out my back from overworking, I'm feeling high in spirits. Thank you to the team for dealing with my constant shenanigans and working extra during this busy rush!"

The sales figure is good news for a good game, but not exactly surprising given that Slay the Spire overtook Marathon and Resident Evil Requiem as the #1 seller on Steam right after its release. It might be quite similar to its predecessor, but it's hard to blame anyone for playing the hits.

That blog post teased some things for the future as well—Steam Workshop support, a scoring system overhaul, a phobia accessibility mode, and so on. There's no exact timeline, and Mega Crit says in the post that "new content and balance changes will come to the main branch whenever we feel they're ready."

The post also notes that the Slay the Spire board game's expansion, Downfall, will release March 24, and shows off some merchandise for the swag-inclined. If you're one of the good folks who got really into Slay the Spire, it seems like you've got plenty to look forward to.

I blinked, and it was Monday. I'm sure we're all feeling that, but I made a mistake most grievous on Friday afternoon by installing both the card-slinging roguelike Slay the Spire 2 and the new Disco Elysium-like RPG Esoteric Ebb on my ROG Ally. I thought I would sample a little of this, a little of that, and go on about my weekend business after a few hours with both. I was wrong.

I did nothing all weekend. Well, I did play Slay the Spire 2 and Esoteric Ebb, but I did nothing else seeing as those two absolutely gobbled up my free time.

In my defense, I somehow dodged the original phenomenon that was Slay the Spire, and didn't know it was that damn good. As for the latter, my colleague and good-RPG-taste-haver, Ted Litchfield, tried to warn me that the Disco-like was phenomenal in his Esoteric Ebb review, so I have no excuse there.

I'm weak, the games are good, and I have a ROG Ally. They weren't the game releases I had my eye on in March, but I'm so pleasantly surprised by how good they feel to play on a handheld that I can't shut up about the combination. And now I'd love to hear the same from you, PC gamers—is there anything you're deep into right now that just feels especially good to play on the go?

Perhaps I'm extra enthusiastic after what feels like a longer slump for my own gaming tastes, but it's been a while since the RPG gears clicked into place for me and I can't recall the last time I was this into a deckbuilder. It's not that there's been a shortage of good games: I just didn't know what I was in the mood for until I found, well, what I was in the mood for. This is also what it feels like to ask me what I want to eat for dinner. I'm sorry.

Anyway, it turns out all I wanted to play on my Ally was a good-ass card game and a satirical RPG where I can incessantly remind everyone, "I'm The Cleric, by the way." I know I've found the handheld sweet spot when I'm not longing to hear my clickity clackity keyboard or goading my 4080 Super into setting itself on fire.

Slay the Spire 2 is built for tiny screens and portable ease. The deckbuilder strikes a near-perfect balance between the joys of incremental progress through constant failure and occasional RNG knife twist or blessing. It's easy to learn, you'll have the hang of it after a few rounds, but even if you're catastrophically bad as I am, it's still fun. It's not like I wasn't making any progress for hours, but let's just say I wasn't slaying no spires. I was slaying the groundfloor lobby, at most. I've since learned it's fun to strategize and really try, and being so easy to pick up and put down helps with that.

Esoteric Ebb is another story, so maybe save that for when you can swaddle yourself in a heap of blankets and set aside some reading time. There's a ton of objects and NPCs to investigate, so it definitely presents as something better suited for keyboard and mouse, but the Ally's controller setup worked just fine.

I was also surprised by how well the game's art style lends itself to readability, particularly in the more crowded environments. All those bold, black lines and sharp, saturated colors made it easy for me to identify points of interest without straining over a tiny screen. I've spent countless hours in Disco Elysium the same way, but squinting.

Outside of being the perfect genres and presentations for handheld gaming, they get points for being so easy to tweak and run on my Ally. I had play Esoteric Ebb on low settings to keep the framerate smooth, and Slay the Spire 2's early access build occasionally sputters, but I don't mind the adjustments. Esoteric Ebb retains its stylish vibrance and Slay the Spire doesn't need frame-by-frame precision. It's not often I even prefer to play something on my Ally, but that's certainly the case now.

It's nice. Maybe I'll even take this bad boy outside to touch some grass. And now I must ask you again: What have you been playing on the go? Any games, new or old, have you spending a little more time with your handheld PC?

The Golden Compass is one of Slay the Spire 2's more unusual floor starting bonuses, a little similar to Vakuu's Whispering Earring that lets the demon play your first hand for you—if only in terms of its weirdness. This is one of the bonuses you can claim for Tezcatara, the candle-loving floor guardian who frequently appears at the start of Act 2.

While the relic's description pretty much says what it does, it's understandable you'd have more questions, so here's exactly what the Golden Compass does in Slay the Spire 2.

Here's what the Golden Compass does in Slay the Spire 2

When you meet Tezcatara, It Which Feeds the Fire, you can potentially grab the Golden Compass as a floor starting reward. This giant jack o lantern wearing a witch hat usually appears in Act 2 for me as the starting floor guardian and offers three potential bonuses, including the also very weird Wax Relic Set.

The description for the Golden Compass reads "replaces the Act 2 map with a single special path," and that's exactly what it does, creating a single route you have to follow through Act 2 all the way to the boss. For me, this path consisted of:

1. Battle
2. Encounter
3. Battle
4. Campfire
5. Battle
6. Campfire
7. Encounter
8. Chest
9. Encounter
10. Chest
11. Encounter
12. Shop
13. Elite
14. Campfire
15. Elite
16. Campfire
17. Act boss

It's hard to tell whether this is random, but I think, considering the two elites at the end who both have campfires after them, it seems like it follows some rules in terms of fairness and consistency.

As you can see, though, it's not a bad track at all. Is it worth spending your Act 2 starting bonus on it, though? Probably not when you can just navigate a similar route yourself with a little forethought. Still, good to know it's an option if you ever get tired of planning and want to spice things up.

Thanks to reporting from Automata, a new card collecting game has taken PC Gamer by storm, and I'm not talking about Slay the Spire 2 (that has also taken us by storm). I'm talking about Wikigacha, a browser-based game where you open packs to collect little cards corresponding to Wikipedia articles.

The Macombs Dam Bridge, Elizabeth II, the Gouzenko Affair, these are but a few of the crown jewels in my collection so far. Wikipedia's all-encompassing nature means my coworkers and I have unfortunately secured a few collar-tuggers as well: News writer Lincoln Carpenter is the not-exactly-proud owner of a Religious views of Adolf Hitler, while I have stoically accepted the burden of School segregation in the United States.

This game is so devious: It's such a good parody of the gacha genre, where you're usually opening up packs of doe-eyed anime ladies of either the "big sword" or "equine" variety. But replacing them with Wikipedia articles injects gacha with the addicting quality of a Wikipedia rabbit hole⁠—you can lie to yourself that you're learning something here. Instead of opening up 40 tabs out of nowhere, I'm getting stuff like Estonia national football team results (2020-present) served up fresh by Wikigacha's deliciously tactile card packs.

There's even a "battle" system: A card's attack is determined by its article's popularity, while the defense is derived from its length. You can use your cards to challenge daily "raid bosses," rare cards that you face off against in an attrition autobattle, your own cards slowly chipping away at a big health pool. I took down Operation Catechism, while PCG senior editor Chris Livingston was confronted with the fearsome sight of Bariatric surgery.

Wikigacha also has what feels like the opposite of predatory monetization. You get 10 packs to open per day, with that counter refilling at a brisk rate of one per minute. You can watch an ad to refill straight back to 10, but I can't tell if the implementation is universally borked, or just outside of the creator's native Japan: I've been faced with a placeholder from a Japanese ad company each time I've tried it.

I love this weird little website, and my only complaints are its minimal use of generative AI⁠—it used an LLM to produce Magic-style italicized flavor text for rare cards, a great bit sullied by a distasteful technology⁠—and how much Wikigacha is tanking my productivity when I've got stuff to do.

Slay the Spire 2 released in early access on Thursday, and as beloved as the original Slay the Spire is, I'm not sure anyone expected there to be quite this much love for the sequel.

At the time of writing, Slay the Spire 2 has hit a peak of 430,456 concurrent Steam players and is #1 on the global top sellers list, even as Bungie shooter Marathon sees its first week in action.

Developer Mega Crit itself has seemed surprised by the enormity of the response. Last year, our council of gaming luminaries named Slay the Spire 2 our most wanted upcoming game. Speaking to PC Gamer at the time, Mega Crit co-founder Casey Yano downplayed the studio's expectations, saying it was a "surprise" to be at the top of the list.

"Voted number one is an honour and a surprise," Yano said. "I feel like Slay the Spire is the chicken noodle soup of videogames. It's not exciting, but I hope people like our soup."

On Slay the Spire 2's launch day this week, Mega Crit joked that its fans shouldn't let "small indie passion projects" like Marathon pass them by, but the deckbuilder has in fact massively outperformed Bungie's brand new extraction shooter on Steam.

Which isn't to kick sand at Marathon, a PvP-focused shooter that we like so far, and which is also available on consoles. It's launching against stiff competition from more mainstream, PvE-oriented games Arc Raiders and Helldivers 2, as well as a resurgent Overwatch, and other popular shooters like Marvel Rivals and Rainbow Six Siege.

Mega Crit also joked this week that Slay the Spire 2's early concurrent players peak was a "92,982% increase" over Slay the Spire 1's, "meaning StS3 is on track to hit 166,861,777 concurrent players by 2035."

Anything could happen. I've only had a few spoonfuls so far, but it's good soup.

Even in early access, Slay the Spire 2 contains more stuff—cards, enemies, and so on—than the original Slay the Spire, according to the developers at Mega Crit. Yet studio co-founder Anthony Giovannetti has described refining the hit roguelike deckbuilder as an 'incredibly destructive' process.

Speaking to PC Gamer in an interview last year, Giovannetti said that 100-200 cards were considered for each character before paring their collections down to around 60 each.

"It's kind of like you're a butcher," Giovannetti said. "You generate thousands, tens of thousands of different ideas and then you look at them all and you go, 'these are bad,' and you just cut them all away. There's this constant culling process. Very rarely is there this golden idea you keep from start to finish. Most of it is this incredibly destructive process."

There's more carnage to come: Mega Crit plans to keep Slay the Spire 2 in early access for one to two years, or "until the game feels great," and will add new "cards, events, environments, enemies, and more" as it approaches that 1.0 release.

My first run felt pretty great already, but it has to be a wildly complicated game to balance with so many possible interactions between cards, temporary status effects, relics (objects that apply permanent effects to a run), and the special abilities of its peculiar and sometimes dastardly monsters. One boss I faced tries to suck you into a sandpit, which can only be avoided by playing special cards that appear only in that battle, as an example.

I also at one point held onto a useless egg card through several fights so that I could hatch it into a bird that sinks its talons into my enemies with a 0-cost attack card, and which I'm now going to seek out in every subsequent run because I love that bird, probably ruining my chances at developing coherent strategies.

Broadly speaking, Slay the Spire 2 is a 'more of what you liked' kind of sequel: A new campaign with new ideas, but the same basic format as the original, outside the addition of a four-player co-op mode.

That was clearly a good choice: Just a day after launch, Slay the Spire 2 has peaked at 430,456 Steam concurrents. It's an astonishing start for the early access roguelike, which is seated above even Arc Raiders on the Steam Most Played chart as I write.

I used to play a lot of co-operative board games like Arkham Horror, Pandemic, and Space Alert, where it's you and your friends against the board. They're great, because instead of playing a board game for an hour or more and then having your friends be cross at you for thrashing them, the board wins and you all get to feel equally bad instead.

The board would usually win because we don't allow backseat driving, or quarterbacking—that's when the player with the most experience takes over for newbies, basically puppeteering them instead of letting them make their own mistakes. It's always a problem with co-op games, which can be super easy if you play at maximum efficiency but super hard if you just muddle through and react to situations as they happen.

Turtle Team-Up turns Magic: The Gathering's TMNT crossover into a co-op game. It's a box with four 60-card decks, one themed around each Ninja Teen, as well as a set of cards for bosses and events those two-to-four players using the Turtle decks will have to deal with. (While you can expand the Turtle decks with random cards you get from booster packs, the ones in the box will always be the same, designed for balance and synergy.)

It starts easy. As in a normal game of Magic, the players bring out land—the broccoli-pizza forest card was an instant favorite—and tap it to play cards representing a growing army of creatures. After one peaceful turn you flip the top boss of the boss deck and find out if you're up against Bebop or Leatherhead or whoever, each with their own debuff or special ability, then flip some event cards (the amount differs depending how many players you have). Those event cards might debuff players or make them discard, or they might bring out a Foot Clan ninja who will defend the boss on player turns.

The Turtles share a life total you track on shell-shaped tokens with pizza-slice counters, and the bosses have a life total as well. Deplete that by getting past the Foot Clan to defeat one boss and the next boss comes out—but this time you flip two of them, and then after that three at once. It's a natural ramping-up of difficulty, a videogame-feeling way of making subsequent levels harder. You thought it was easy fighting Rocksteady on his own? Here's Shredder and Krang.

Which is not to say Turtle Team-Up is particularly difficult. We were hit hard by an event that caused damage for each creature we had in play just after I'd brought out a small army of robotic mousers, but we bounced back by working together.

April O'Neil, Human Element was our MVP. She's part of Michelangelo's deck, which is heavy on using Mutagen to power up creatures. April gives out a free Mutagen token when any player brings out an artifact, instant, or sorcery card, and then those Mutagens can be spent on +1/+1 counters to power up creatures. Each one costs mana to play, which I contributed to by playing Casey & Raph, Hotheads to give Mikey a couple of extra points.

In return, other players helped me by paying the four mana it cost to double the power of Casey Jones, Asphalt Hooligan. While calculating his combat damage, I forgot to factor in his double-strike ability until someone else pointed it out. The obscene amount of damage he caused ended up obliterating our final round of bosses, a beautiful victory for teamwork.

Unlike other co-op games, Turtle Team-Up seems easy to win with only a little bit of backseat driving, but the real challenge is in finding out how fast you can win. The rule booklet has a series of titles you earn by clearing it in fewer turns, but it's clearly pitched at first-timers and younger players who'd rather not lose over and over until you figure out the best way to win at Arkham Horror and then bully your friends into playing correctly.

Though I'm not planning to add cards from this TMNT set to my regular decks, and have forgotten half the characters from the show and comics (the Mighty Mutanimals I recognized, the Neutrinos not so much), the Turtle Team-Up box seems particularly useful as a parents-and-kids experience—though one that's also suited for nostalgic adults who are two pints deep, he says from practical experience.

Magic: The Gathering's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles set will be on tabletops from March 6, and is available in Arena now.

You never know what's going to happen with sequels to influential indie sensations like Slay the Spire, which inspired a torrent of other roguelike deckbuilders after it released in early access in 2017. Sometimes, the follow-up gets lost in the sea of its own imitators, and doesn't blow up like the first one.

Not this time. Slay the Spire 2 released in early access today, and immediately shot to the top of Steam's top sellers list: It's #1 globally, above Marathon. In the early evening here in North America, it's also fourth right now for concurrent players, with a first-day peak of 177,362.

I put about an hour into it earlier today, and yeah, it immediately got its hooks in me. From what I've seen so far, it is a classic 'more of what you already liked' kind of sequel: Same format, same basic design, but new enemies, new cards and effects, new artifacts, and so on.

One cool new thing I encountered on my first run—which I've paused to write this, I just cleared the second boss—was an egg which I had to hold onto until I got to a campsite, where I could hatch it. My reward was a special card, but even better than that, a cool bird dude who hangs out next to me during battles. I love that dude. I'll die for that dude.

The one really big new feature in Slay the Spire 2 is four-player co-op, and I've been too invested in my current run to investigate it—we'll give it a go soon and report back.

You never know what's going to be a hit these days, but clearly I was wrong to wonder whether Slay the Spire's original audience had moved on. The world wants to slay that spire again. According to Newzoo data, the original Slay the Spire reached a five-year high for monthly active users on Steam in January at 658,000 (in 37 markets), suggesting that loads of players were revisiting the original in anticipation of the sequel.

If you didn't play the original, I think this is a case where you're totally fine to jump into the sequel, and if you fall in love with it, consider playing the first game as well. Slay the Spire 2 is expected to remain in early access for one to two years, but developer Mega Crit says it "already has more content" than the original.

Slay the Spire 2's release is almost here at long last.

After a delay from late 2025, Slay the Spire 2 enters early access on March 5, with new and returning playable characters, a whole mess of cards, and a big new feature: four player co-op.

Given the first game's popularity, Slay the Spire 2 may have Steam-breaking potential, so don't be shocked if the servers seem a bit unstable as the card game goes live on the store. Assuming all goes well, though, here's exactly when you can grab it.

Slay the Spire 2 release times for each region

This is an easy one: Slay the Spire 2 has a global unlock time on Steam, and it's coincidentally launching at the exact same time as Bungie's Marathon.

Slay the Spire 2 releases at 10 am Pacific on Thursday, March 5. Here's how that breaks down across timezones:

• Los Angeles: 10 am
• New York: 1 pm
• London: 6 pm
• Paris: 7 pm
• Seoul: 2 am (March 6)
• Sydney: 3 am (March 6)

We learned Slay the Spire 2's release time thanks to a Reddit AMA with the team, which you should read if you're sitting there twiddling your thumbs waiting for the game to release. It's also confirmed on the Steam page itself.

What was the worst PC launch of last year? There's no shortage of possible answers, everything from Monster Hunter Wilds' no good, very bad PC performance, to whatever the hell happened with MindsEye. But allow me to nominate another contender for 2025's most infamous award. The Bazaar is a charming, colourful auto-battler that, when it released back in March last year, managed to alienate almost its entire community—squandering its potential through a flurry of bad press and fan outrage. After a positive beta period and a smattering of positive streamer attention, its official launch introduced a bevy of microtransactions and monetisation schemes that soured its playerbase and made it incredibly hard to actually recommend.

Which puts me in a difficult position, because… it's really, really good. I think you should play it.

The Bazaar takes place in a sort of galactic marketplace. You pick your hero and visit a selection of shops to buy items that you place onto your board. Visit the weapon shop, for instance, and you might be offered a Katana that does low damage on a fast cooldown. Or maybe a cutlass, which is slower, but attacks twice and deals double crit damage—tripling its initial attack value. If you're lucky, you'll be offered a sharkray, which gains damage every time you haste something on your board.

At the end of each day, you fight another player's board. Here you watch as items automatically trigger until one player is declared the winner based on the strength of the board they've assembled.

Win or lose, a new day begins, with more shops and events that let you strengthen your board—refining, improving or pivoting to create the strongest build you can make from the options you're given.

The juice here is in how varied The Bazaar's many items can be, and the wild synergies they can unlock. Most shops only sell items from your hero's item pool, but despite that restriction there's still plenty of variety each run. Do you go for an ammo build, designed to deal enough fast damage to kill your opponent before all of your items run out of charges and stop working? Do you go for a poison build, which is slower, but can bypass any shield items your opponent may have? Do you focus on 'friends'—a mixture of aquatic creatures and robotic critters—to take advantage of some powerful late-game large items that buff themselves through the power of friendship?

As the days roll on, you'll access more powerful items, skills that provide passive benefits to your build, and even enchantments that can give an item an extra special effect.

Inevitably a meta emerges each patch—currently weapons seem a little oppressive, following a nerf to burn items. Despite that, my favourite way to play is to pick a hero at random and just figure out something based on what disparate items I'm offered. The best feeling in the Bazaar is when a shop offers up an item or skill that synergises perfectly with the set-up you're building. And when you eventually get to visit shops that let you buy items from other heroes, that's when things can really start getting wild.

Here's an example. In the above video you can see one of the most experimental boards I've constructed in recent weeks. It's day 15, when the builds you face have often been refined to the point of godhood.

My build is the one at the bottom of the screen. I will explain the items going right-to-left. Trust me, it's easier this way:

• Port: Large items are often the defining part of your build, because naturally they require the most slots on your board. Port is usually one of the more underwhelming ones. It reloads every ammo item on your board and also charges an ammo item, making it trigger faster. But as ammo builds are usually about killing quick and fast, it's generally not something you'd run.
• Nesting Doll: This little fella guy gives you a comically small amount of shield every two seconds. In the history of The Bazaar, no player has been saved by the amount of shield generated by a nesting doll. No, the reason it's here is because it's a fast cooldown ammo item, making it the engine that drives the next item…
• Ballista: This is the heart of the build. It's a nine-second cooldown item, which would be achingly slow if it wasn't for the port constantly charging it. And while it only does 375 damage per shot here, it gains multicast every time another ammo item is used—for instance a nesting doll. And because it's my only weapon and I picked up the skill Quality over Quantity, it also has lifesteal—so I heal every time it fires.
• Fiber Optics: An item from a different hero's pool, but one that can enable some absolutely wild builds whoever you're playing as. It's a passive item that charges up the rightmost item on your board every time you use the leftmost item. In this case my rightmost item is port, which is reloading and also charging all the other items, creating a loop of instant triggers.
• Atomic Clock: Also another hero's item, but one that here makes the whole build come together. It has a one second cooldown, making it even faster than nesting doll. But unlike nesting doll, its active effect is also incredibly useful. Every time it fires it increases the cooldown of an enemy item for one second. Normally that's balanced by its low ammo count. Dooley, the hero this item belongs to, doesn't have many ways to actually reload ammo. Vanessa, the hero I'm playing here, has loads of ways to reload items, including the port, which, thanks to fiber optics, is being charged every time the atomic clock goes off. That means it never runs out of ammo, which means my opponent's also very strong build just gets slower and slower and slower as my ballista gains more and more multicast charges.

These are the kind of synergies you dream of when you start a run of The Bazaar. It's a game that rewards experimentation and versatility—cleverly structuring its items and events in a way that promises big payoffs (or complete ruin) from a late game pivot into something new and inventive.

It's also absurdly slick—its sound design, its animations, its art, everything feels premium in a way that other auto-battlers struggle to match. It's a crime that it's not bigger than it is.

That it isn't is in large part down to just how badly developer Tempo fumbled the launch. Even after the studio had backpeddled on its monetisation plans, it still had a pretty bumpy period in the months following its official release. I stopped playing a few months after launch, at a time when Tempo seemed to struggle with balance, leading to some absolutely miserable metas that curtailed experimentation in favour of boring, easy-to-force builds.

I only came back on a whim, after hearing some rumblings that things were much better now, and because—despite all its early failings—The Bazaar has always had an abundance of promise, if only it could be properly harnessed. And yes, things are better now. New cards and heroes make it harder to force specific builds, encouraging variety and experimentation. And the monetisation is largely fixed: you can get a lot out of the base purchase and the three heroes you get with it, with three others available as (admittedly pricey) DLC.

It's even got matchmaking in ranked mode now, giving you a gentler onramp into the game's difficulty curve before you're haunted by the ghosts of players with hundreds of hours more experience. Yes, there are still frustrations—you will still build something terrifying, only to immediately go up against its direct counter. But despite any rough edges that still linger, The Bazaar now feels like the game it should have been at launch. And if you were put off by the negativity, or just never heard of it in the first place, I recommend taking a look now Tempo has had almost a year to recover from the fallout of the game's ill-fated release.

Nerial is the French indie studio behind Card Shark and the Reigns series, and not immediately the team you would pick for a Witcher game—unless it was a singleplayer Gwent story like Thronebreaker perhaps. Instead, Nerial is adapting the Reigns series to Geralt's adventures, having had what they call "great success" with a Game of Thrones version in 2018. A conversation with CD Projekt Red at GDC a couple of years ago got the ball rolling, and later this month they'll be releasing Reigns: The Witcher.

"The games were our first point of reference, as we're working with CDPR", creative director Francois Alliot and narrative designer Oscar Harrington-Shaw say, answering my questions via email as a gestalt. "So you'll meet familiar characters such as Yen, Triss, and Regis who more closely resemble their character in the games rather than the books, and we've adapted many popular quests and iconic moments—you might encounter a stuffed unicorn, or a mute druid."

While this game's cartoon versions of everyone from Dandelion to godlings are faithful to The Witcher 3, Nerial has added to the lore as well. Playing a preview build I was eaten by a tarasque—not the D&D monster with two Rs in its name, but the lion-headed dragon-turtle of French mythology. As Alliot and Harrington-Shaw say, "we love how [Witcher creator Andrzej] Sapkowski poached from lots of disparate strands of mythology to inspire the books, and so we also took this approach when writing new storylines, taking inspiration from Euripidean tragedies, the lais of Marie de France and even Provençal folklore."

Getting their game to gel with the existing world of the games and the books was made easier when they hit on the structure, with each of your pick-a-path adventures a ballad being composed by Dandelion based on Geralt's saga, rather than a "real" event from his life. It took a while to come up with this more fanciful spin on the regular Reigns structure of playing a ruler and then their heirs.

"One thought was to frame the game as though you were playing through a mage's prediction of a potential future for Geralt," they say, "using cards to divine possible upcoming events. We wondered if the reveal at the end could have been that this card divination was in fact the original use of Gwent cards, as though Reigns: The Witcher was the backstory of Gwent. Sort of the reverse of the history of Tarot, which began as a card game and was later used for fortune-telling. But it was hard to square this with the chronology of the Witcher universe."

Each decision you make has an effect on four meters measuring how liked or hated Geralt is by different communities, and how committed he is to the witcher's path. Turn down a noble who demands you burn a mage's tower for daring to be taller than his own and the magical community will like you more, while the human population will like you less. Make enough decisions that bottom out Geralt's human appeal and you'll be lynched. Making decisions that top out meters can be just as dangerous, like when I cozied up to the mages too much and died of overexertion in a drug-fueled sorceress orgy.

An earlier version of the favorability system "placed too much of an emphasis on the class politics of the Witcher world, as opposed to human vs nonhuman conflict, and didn't allow much focus on combat," the developers say. "By reducing the factional values to three (human, nonhuman and mage) and introducing the monster-hunting value, this shifted the balance closer to the source material, where Geralt is balancing the favor of hostile groups, but also trying to survive as a sword for hire. When the monster-hunting value reaches the maximum it triggers a fight with a monster, generally the one you're currently tracking."

These fights are new to Reigns, a rhythmic minigame where your opponent rains attacks down a board as you hop left and right to dodge them while trying to catch swords and land on signs to defeat your foe. While traditionally Reigns has found most of its audience on mobile, where swiping to make decisions has a deliberately dating-app feel, this makes it seem more at home on a handheld. "We've done a lot of our testing on Steam Deck", Alliot and Harrington-Shaw say. "It's been Steam Deck Verified by Valve and we think it's one of the best ways to play the game. It feels right at home."

Though if you're playing it in public, don't let anyone see what you get up to with the stuffed unicorn and the sorceresses. Reigns: The Witcher will be available on Steam and GOG from February 25.

Did you feel that? The echoing reverberation of thousands of collective hours of roguelike deckbuilding thudding into place ahead of us on the timestream? That's because Slay the Spire 2 just locked in its early access release on March 5, and—surprise—it's bringing four player co-op on launch day.

I'll give you a moment to rotate the magnitude of this in your mind.

Announced via a new early access trailer, Mega Crit confirmed co-op's inclusion with a lovely animation of The Silent meeting a thoroughly unlovely end. But after her ensuing resurrection, she's joined by the Necrobinder, Regent, and Ironclad to embark on her next attempted Spire-slaying as part of a team.

Oh, the Defect is back, too. Congratulations to orbs.

"Brave the ascent on your own, or play with up to four players and face the Spire together in the all new co-op mode," Slay the Spire 2's freshly-updated Steam page says. "Discover multiplayer-specific cards, powerful team synergies, and carry your friends (or get carried) to victory!"

I can't help but notice that Mega Crit has conveniently omitted "force your friends to wait while you map out the next-turn implications of your available cards at a glacial pace" from its description of the experience, but maybe I'm projecting.

From the glimpses of co-op gameplay included in the trailer, it looks like the multiplayer mode is pretty fully featured: You and your comrades can plan your route through the tower with collaborative map-sketching, splash each other with potions, watch as you each deliberate between a treasure chest's relic choices, and—presumably—point and laugh when your Ironclad buddy gets a little overzealous with hitting themselves.

Considering how easily the first Slay the Spire could casually demolish hundreds of hours of a player's time, I fear for what the potential synergies of four-player Slay the Spire might do to humanity's overall well-being. The global economy's already on shaky enough ground without this particular productivity hit.

That said, if Slay the Spire 2 topples everything when it launches in early access on March 5, it certainly won't be the worst way we could've gone out. At least there'll be some cool poison builds.

What do you get when you fuse the ultimate half-paying-attention time-waster with the act of collecting cards, somehow the most compulsive activity known to man, and then make it go really fast? You get a game seemingly grown in a lab to be the ultimate time killer. Vampire Crawlers is Wolverine for your social calendar.

At least that's the impression I got from playing the demo, which I meant to take for a brief spin on Sunday and then played for two uninterrupted hours, straight past midnight.

The pitch, which I think is a savvy one given the prevalence of card roguelikes on Steam today, is speed: developer poncle isn't calling it "the turbo wildcard" for nothing. As in your typical dungeon crawler, you're moving around a map one step at a time, with monsters on the field triggering combat encounters when you walk up to them. Then out come the cards, already familiar if you've played Vampire Survivors: knives and axes and bibles and armor, recontextualized here to hit certain numbers of enemies at once or knock them back or top up your defenses for a turn.

The difference between Vampire Crawlers and other card games like Slay the Spire is that you can play the cards as fast as you can mash a button. Heck, it even has a button for playing your entire hand at once.

That sounds mindless, right? In an easy battle against some basic skellies, it can be—as in Vampire Survivors, there are moments here where you've assembled a deck and can just bulldoze the encounter as damage numbers fill the screen. But also like Vampire Survivors, as soon as the difficulty ramps up a little bit just throwing out cards is a way to suddenly find yourself dying to a neon bat.

Proper play is built around a combo system, which multiplies the damage of each successive card when played in ascending mana cost. This affects not just in-the-moment play but deckbuilding—stuff your deck with too many zero cost cards or too many powerful 3 mana cards, and you may not have enough 1s and 2s to keep a combo going.

Treasure chests and level up screens also award gems that can slot bonuses like 2x damage onto specific cards, which further encourage thinking about play order—why waste an 80 damage card when it could become a 360 damage card when played at the right time?

I barely started to wrap my head around a lot of the other card interplay going on in Vampire Crawlers that's been adapted from Survivors—how to take advantage of Spinach juicing up my overall damage percentage, Duplicator adding extra projectiles for every played card, and card colors dictating what upgrades can be applied to them.

I ended up playing Vampire Crawlers at a thinkier, less manic pace than the game allows—even on the Steam Deck it showed no signs of slowdown when I tested out the "play your whole hand at once" button and watched the particles and gems fly—but I have a feeling my default pace will grow faster and faster as what cards to play in what order becomes second nature.

As you'd expect from a Vampire Survivors spin-off, there are scads of things to unlock, from characters to permanent stat boosts to abilities that put hidden points of interest on your map. Evolutions are still a thing if you have the right combination of cards in your deck, bosses sometimes appear out of nowhere to surprise you, and levels sharply increase in challenge when you repeat them on harder difficulties.

It's early to call it, but Vampire Crawlers' best idea may be how it's interpreted passive bonuses like Spinach or Clover, which boosts your luck, into wildcards. In the original game these would often be sitting around the map waiting for you to pick them up, but here they serve as one-time-use combo extenders when you play them (the passive bonus stays active for the rest of the run, but the card is gone from your deck). At first I was burning them as soon as I drew them—but then I realized they'd come in clutch in a tough boss fight, allowing me to dramatically increase my combo chain.

Once I geared a deck towards filling my hand with extra cards and mana boosts, my usual 0-1-2 combo could become 0-1-2-W-0-1-2-3, with damage ramping up so sharply I could kill a floor boss in a single hand. Considering there's a screenshot on the Steam page showing a x40 multiplier, I am clearly just scratching the surface.

The game already seems polished and stuffed with stuff, with release planned for sometime in the middle of 2026. It'll be available to play in Steam Next Fest next week, but I suggest approaching with caution. Sure, it looks a bit frivolous. And in terms of head-scratching strategy, Vampire Crawlers does still seem to fall on the light end of the deckbuilder spectrum.

But just like Vampire Survivors, I suspect that's what will make it so dangerous. Just one more run, right? How long could it take?

I wasn't sure it would work. When it falls, a Derelict Fortress damages every enemy in front of it, but I've only seen that happen when one dies. Right now, my opponent—a devil with a face like a shivering circle of little wings made of gold—has a bunch of weedy enemies in a row I'd love to drop a tower on.

The Stunted Spawn card in my hand replaces a creature with a goopy monster that has higher stats, but will playing it on my Derelict Fortress trigger that on-death effect? If a tower falls in a goo swamp, does it cause damage? I have no way of knowing, and someone's soul is on the line if I get it wrong.

The Killing Stone is a card game that casts you as a witch's apprentice going through the will your mistress left behind, only to discover it's a devil's contract with multiple souls tangled up in fiendish legalese. The contract disagreement that ensues as you try to free the trapped souls plays out as hands of a game called Fanghella, named after the Icelandic boulders used to break the backs of ritual sacrifices. There's a whole narrative layer set in a mansion on an island in the Arctic Circle, which the owner calls Little Denmark.

It's a lot, but we'll get back to that later. First I have to tell you that, yes, playing Stunted Spawn on my Derelict Fortress did trigger its on-death effect, letting me get an attack through that blew up my opponent and scattered pieces across the board in a slow-motion blast like I just scored a goal in Rocket League.

The Killing Stone's card game has a structure right out of Slay the Spire's dungeons, where you pick paths that might let you upgrade cards, add new ones to your deck, or choose between fighting a trivial minion battle or an elite boss battle. Fortunately the actual game doesn't feel as much like Slay the Spire, which is rare in a deckbuilder. For starters, there are no defend cards, and block effects seem uncommon—it's typical for most if not all of the creatures on one side of the board to get wiped every turn. It's just a matter of how much excess damage goes through to the big eyeball that represents the owner's health behind all those creatures.

There's also a reserve mechanic that lets you play cards above creatures on the battleline. Maybe a spare creature that slots down into place when the one beneath it dies, or an incantation that buffs the creature beneath. Creatures in reserve still trigger effects, so if a Flask of Thoughts is safely in reserve its healing power will still go off every turn.

Between matches, I run around the mansion talking to the descendants of my mistress, Mariken, unwittingly caught in the infernal legal battle playing out in their basement. Mariken's familiars are a chatty bunch, and when I pay respects to Mariken's corpse (by pressing F, of course) she has a good natter in my ear as well.

Mariken's voiced by Emma Gregory, who you'll probably recognize as Minthara from Baldur's Gate 3, while the chief devil is voiced by Critical Role's Liam O'Brien, who has a good line in evil chuckles. Everyone else communicates purely in text. You can choose whether the dialogue—audio and text, or either individually—is delivered in old-fashioned yet broadly Modern English, or full-on 17th century Period English.

The English Lit. major in me loves this. I did eventually turn Period English off, though—at least for the text. I still get to hear Gregory and O'Brien declaiming like they're in Hamlet, but accompanied by subtitles that present things a little more plainly. I feel like that guy from Shakespeare in Love begging Will to stop speaking in verse, but between the occult mystery I'm trying to unravel and the card game I'm trying to learn, my brain didn't have enough leftover horsepower to also deal with people who say "perchance".

It's not that The Killing Stone is hard. If anything, it's too easy, and I was only challenged once in the hours I've spent playing it. It's not the difficulty of the rules, but the amount of them. There are some nodes where your familiars earn revelation points by poring over the legalese—the idea of a dog, a cat, and a bird all working together to find oversights in contract law is delightful—and those points can be spent during the bargaining rounds where you and a devil vote on which boons and banes to add to the game.

But revelations can also be spent to reroll options you're given when upgrading your deck, which you can do either by adding new pacts or improving the ones you've got. Pacts are the sets of three or four cards your deck is made of—you're rarely ditching or adding an individual card, but instead manipulating entire chunks of deck designed to encourage specific playstyles, or balance good cards with mediocre ones.

On the game board you'll need to deal with tunneling effects, which let creatures bypass some of the opponents lined up against them, and blast ones, which let creatures damage enemies behind their target in addition to it. And sliding effects, which move them along the line. And the difference between effects that trigger on Resolve, and ones that trigger on Deploy. I haven't even mentioned curse cards, which not only waste your time when you draw them, but also prevent you from removing pacts that contain them. Or the way each familiar has a different ability that's set off when you discard.

All these rules, and many more, contribute to the feeling of being a mystical accountant. But they also mean that, several hours into The Killing Stone, I still feel like I'm in a prologue. When it took time out to explain lethal effects, a real "baby's first Magic: The Gathering keyword" kind of rule, I laughed at the screen. I keep waiting for The Killing Stone to let me do things with the mountain of rules it's throwing at me, but only occasionally do I get to combine them like I did with the Derelict Fortress, and even more rarely do I need to. One boss battle made itself hard by forcing a card into my hand that killed one of my own creatures and which I had to play, but that felt like an external intrusion to ramp the difficulty up rather than something that emerged from the existing rules.

The Killing Stone was initially going to release in a full 1.0 version this month, but instead has been released in early access. I'm glad it was, because intriguing as the concept and story are, the pacing feels off and that's made it a chore to play. You can check The Killing Stone out for yourself with a demo on Steam.

I finally got around to playing throwback sidescroller Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge and, yeah, everyone was right about how good it is. Where can I go for more TMNT goodness? Oh right, they're the next Magic: The Gathering crossover set.

We're returning to everyone's favorite plane in the multiverse, New York City. Unlike the last Universes Beyond expansion, Avatar: The Last Airbender, the Ninja Turtles are getting a pre-constructed Commander deck—a five-color deck inspired by TMNT videogames with cards like Game Over, Level Up, High Score, and Arcade Cabinet. Some of the cards have pixel art by Kirokaze, to enhance your arcade nostalgia.

The set will also include a Turtle Team-Up box designed for co-op play. Up to four players choose a deck themed around an individual Turtle and work together to take down bosses, which seems like an ideal way to teach Magic to new players. It even has difficulty levels you can work your way through to build up to the full rules.

New mechanics in this set include Sneak, a keyword for cards that can be played when your opponent is selecting blockers, letting you substitute the new card for an attacker you bounce back into your hand. It's like the Ninjutsu mechanic from Kamigawa, only it covers instants and sorcery cards as well as creatures.

There's also Disappear, the "ninja vanish" complement to Sneak's "ninja suddenly appear out of nowhere". Cards with Disappear have effects that trigger at the end of your turn if one of your cards left the battlefield earlier—even if they vanished before you played the card with Disappear on it. And yeah, cards you bounce with Sneak count can set off Disappear effects. As an example, Krang & Shredder force your opponent to exile cards, and if you Disappear something, let you play one of those exiled cards yourself.

The TMNT set also sees the return of the Alliance mechanic from Avatar: The Last Airbender, which lets cards that share the Alliance keyword set off their effects whenever a new card with Alliance is played. It's just as fitting here, given that whole Saturday morning cartoon emphasis on teamwork.

If you just gritted your teeth and muttered something about how the Ninja Turtles were a comic before they were a cartoon, you'll be mollified by the cards with new artwork by TMNT co-creator Kevin Eastman in his traditional style. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Magic set will be available in Arena on March 3 and in paper form on March 6, with prerelease events beginning on February 27.

Hasbro recently announced a multi-year licensing partnership with Warner Bros. to bring the world even more Harry Potter merch than it already has, a thing I struggle to believe is actually possible. The announcement promises "products featuring dolls, role play, action figures & collectibles, interactive plush, board games and more to be revealed later this year."

This made Magic: The Gathering players a little concerned. We just had an Avatar: The Last Airbender set, and we're three weeks out from a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles set. But while some of the crossovers called Universes Beyond have been embraced by players—almost every middle-aged Magic player I know bought a bunch of Avatar cards "for my kids," no really—those aren't ones created by a leading voice in anti-trans panic.

Responding to these concerns on Reddit, the Wizards of the Coast community team posted, "The Magic Multiverse has its own school of Magic at Strixhaven with plenty of secrets still to explore. Our Universes Beyond roadmap currently doesn't have us visiting any others."

Which is comforting to hear. Strixhaven is a magical university that was the subject of a Magic set released in 2021, as well as a Dungeons & Dragons supplement, an upcoming Magic set called Secrets of Strixhaven scheduled for April, and an upcoming YA novel called Strixhaven: Omens of Chaos by Seanan McGuire. As well as not being created by a figurehead of hate speech, the fact it's a university rather than a high school means Strixhaven also dodges all that sketchy child endangerment stuff that makes Harry Potter seem like a satire of British boarding schools until you get about four books in and realize it's actually a weird celebration of them instead.

As well as Secrets of Strixhaven, there's another set that takes place in the Magic multiverse coming in October called Reality Fracture. On either side of it are sets based on The Hobbit and Star Trek, of course. Meanwhile, the licence for Harry Potter trading cards was recently acquired by Upper Deck, though that's purely for collectibles rather than a game.

Being set in the Warcraft universe lets Hearthstone's developers do pretty much whatever they want with familiar moments in its history, so its next expansion puts a dark spin on a critical time in World of Warcraft. Hearthstone: Cataclysm is what would've happened if the big evil dragon, Deathwing, took over WoW in 2010 and was never defeated by players.

It will be your job to fight him in an alternate universe with a bunch of new cards and characters from Hearthstone's past. The expansion will launch on March 17 and will also be the start of a new year of Hearthstone, bringing a new core set of cards and balance changes.

Cataclysm will bring back colossal minions, minion cards that summon more minions, new keywords tied to Deathwing's lieutenants and allied Dragonflight characters, as well as powerful new class spell cards called Triumphs and Last Stands.

A week before the expansion drops, on March 10, every card from the Into the Emerald Dream and The Lost City of Un'Goro expansions will be made into free trial cards to use. And as pointed out in today's Spotlight video, all those cards will be usable until the next expansion. I'm no Hearthstone player, but hearing that nearly all of the cards in the game will be free almost makes me want to see what it's all about.

The developers in the Spotlight stressed that 2026 will be a "year of change" for Hearthstone, and that the meta will shift even more than it usually does. At the end of the video (and in interviews during a recent press event at Blizzard HQ), the developers teased that there will be some big Hearthstone news at BlizzCon in September. I got the sense that it won't just be the next expansion, but something much bigger (that also isn't a sequel, according to the developers).

Given the recent Overwatch news and how the developers want to aim for annual updates that feel like expansions, my guess is Hearthstone will start to have a more regular cadence of updates with something big to kick off each year.

Hearthstone: Cataclysm launches on March 17.

"Inscryption-inspired card battler The Killing Stone gets a rad new trailer showing off voice talent from Critical Role and Baldur's Gate 3, and it's out next month," we said in January. All of that remains true, except that when it releases on February 18 The Killing Stone will now be releasing into early access rather than celebrating a full 1.0 launch.

In an announcement on Steam, writer/director Jordan Thomas, who you may know from Bioshock, The Blackout Club, or that one outstanding level from Thief: Deadly Shadows, wrote that, "Over the course of development, The Killing Stone became more story-forward than originally envisioned in pre-production. It now features a mystery-driven narrative, and interactive conversations with a modern English script and a 17th century script (player's choice).

"The feedback we've gotten from our playtesters suggests that players are especially invested in this narrative layer. They want more story, more voice acted content—and they want to puzzle out what's going on without being spoon-fed, all of which is going to take a lot of iteration based directly on player feedback."

The early access version of The Killing Stone will have all the game's optional missions and all three of its "primary story arcs" as well as "three demon lord opponents across critical path and optional content". What it won't have is "the game's substantial endgame arc, called The Reckoning—that will be added with the final 1.0 release."

While it's a shame to have to wait until later in the year to experience The Killing Stone in its final form, I'm glad to hear there will be more focus on its story, and more from voice actors Liam O'Brien (Critical Role, Marvel Rivals) and Emma Gregory (Minthara from Baldur's Gate 3). While it's been compared to Inscryption a lot, Inscryption's subsequent acts felt like a step down from its much stronger opening—let's hope The Killing Stone can maintain its impetus.

It'll be out on February 18 via Steam, where you can also find a demo to try it for yourself.

Poker Night at the Inventory was, for a very brief time, kind of a phenom in the world of videogames. A relatively early Telltale release, it was a poker game starring four big-at-the-videogame characters: Max from Sam and Max, Strong Bad's Homestar Runner, the needs-no-introduction Heavy, and Tycho from the Penny Arcade webcomic.

It was all a bit of a flash in the pan, though: A sequel arrived in 2013, both of them fizzled out fairly quickly, they were delisted from Steam several years ago, and honestly I don't think anyone has even thought about them in ages. I certainly haven't.

That all changed today, though, because today Skunkape Games announced that Poker Night at the Inventory is coming back in a remastered edition that's set to launch in March. Why, you ask? Well, why not, is my reply, because honestly that's all I can come up with.

Poker Night at the Inventory was fine, really, but it was praised more for its humor and character interactions than the actual gameplay, which was a bit flat and buggy. Here, for instance, is a clip of the Heavy regaling his pals with a story about a funny thing that happened at work.

It's a good story, yes, but the trouble is that once you've heard it all two or three times, you're left with four videogame characters sitting around a table playing a not-great simulation of Texas Hold 'em.

But that wasn't the only thing people found attractive about Poker Night: Check the user reviews on the original Steam listing (it's hidden, but still there if you know where to look, or just click that link) and you'll see quite a few references to 'Team Fortress 2 items.'

The game included four TF2 unlockables, you see—one for each character—and some folks bought it not out of any particular interest in poker or snappy dialog, but just because they wanted the TF2 swag and were willing to invest $5 and a couple hours of their time to get it.

Some of those same people are also awfully excited to hear that, yes indeed, those items are coming back: Win them at the table and they'll become yours in TF2, too.

The remaster itself promises updated graphics and lighting, fixes to improve the underlying poker simulation (which apparently wasn't great in the original), plus "new unlockables and quality-of-life features." It's not the most bedazzling visual update ever, but if you look closely, yeah, it looks... slightly different, at least.

It also bears noting that Skunkape knows a thing or two about updating old Telltale games; The studio was founded by a small group of Telltale veterans, and their updates of Telltale's Sam and Max adventures have been very well received. So that's a plus.

The OG Poker Night sold for a fiver, and at that price a lot of people were happy to get a few hours of fun out of it and then move on. A Skunkape rep told me that the remaster will go for $10, which is not quite so cheap, but hey, it's been 16 years—I think that's fair.

Poker Night at the Inventory will make its big comeback on March 5, and you can wishlist it now on Steam.

After playing a DNA-altering amount of Monster Train 2 over the holiday break, I felt like I was entering the twilight of my time with the game. 370 hours, 127 wins against the Titans—I was still enjoying filling out my logbook with wins, but I'd gotten everything and more that I'd needed out of the game, and my preferences for units and spells had calcified to the point of predictability.

After spending a week with a pre-release build of Destiny of the Railforged, my enthusiasm is renewed. Though the DLC doesn't touch every aspect of Monster Train 2 (there are no new Alcove events, for example), it's a substantial package that makes an already large experience feel supersized.

Also there's a card that lets you grab units—friendly or enemy—with a giant claw and move them to another floor, which feels cool as hell. Yoink.

The anvil and the worm

The two new clans, Railforged (DLC) and Wurmkin (free, available outside the DLC), are meaningfully distinct from the existing roster. Railforged have multiple new mechanics and Wurmkin's room-boosting Charged Echo mechanic makes a welcome return.

Wurmkin, like Melting Remnant, don't have deep cross-interaction with other clans because their spells are so focused on earning and spending Echoes, which have various floor-specific effects. Railforged have much more universality, and I've liked them more than Wurmkin because their design feels so thematically linked with their identity as anvil-smacking Hephaestus lookalikes.

Railforged's smelting mechanic is my favorite thing the clan can do—it opens up fun, newfound strategies and adds value to higher-cost cards. Smelting consumes a card in your hand, melting it down into energy and forge. Some Railforged units produce unplayable scrap metal cards that persist in your hand but "refine" each turn to increase the energy and forge they output. In practice it's sort of like being able to turn any card in your hand into Kindle. But you can also smelt blight cards—the feeling of flipping a harmful curse into raw resources is great. On some runs I was deliberately drafting Calcified Embers just to have them available to smelt.

I have struggled to survive the early game in standard Covenant 10 runs with Railforged, who lack high base attack units and do not have damage spells in either starter deck to ping off weak enemies. They're tuned in a way that challenges you to smartly employ forge—Railforged's in-round resource that boosts the attack and armor of units or equipment when you play them. The mechanic really makes you consider when you play equipment and units in a way that hasn't previously felt like a choice. It also enriches the decisions you make around drafting equipment—I found myself visiting the Merchant of Arms more frequently.

Naturally, the equipment-laden Lazarus League are a particularly strong partner for Railforge. Because forge grants a proportional amount of armor to any equipment or unit you play, the mechanic lets you spot-apply defense in a way that feels different enough to Monster Train 2's existing tricks.

Both of the new clans really value floor space, evidenced by Railforged's Renovate card, which expands the floor by X energy (there's also a card that deals damage proportional to floor capacity). Railforged don't drop conspicuously tough units like Greed Dragon on the board, but they have mindblowing new things they can do like this, or a card with the ability to merge equipment mid-round, Fused Weaponry. Some further evidence that Railforged aren't straightforward bruisers: my favorite unit of theirs is a zero-attack, 50-health factory with an active ability that produces a variety of different burst-imbued mechanical spiders, sort of like Lazarus League's mix mechanic.

Steel Pulley Claw is Railforged's ridiculously high-utility room card, the first room with an active ability, which lets you grab and relocate any friendly unit or enemy to that room's floor. I can't believe it has a cooldown of 1. I was using it every round to peel off pesky backline enemies for easy killing, or to just slowly consolidate my units onto a single floor.

They're a great clan that adds functionality to the existing roster. I like the high amount of interaction between floors and units that Railforged has, which produces a real feeling of teamwork compared to other clans where I'm just running my strategy through a single brute.

Soul train

The other half of the DLC is a new mode called Soul Savior that plays like Monster Train 2 on steroids: enhanced units, absurd upgrades, heightened difficulty. In this new style of run you accumulate spectacular upgrades called souls, bringing up to three souls into the start of each run and then drafting a few more of them as you defeat Soul Savior's five bosses.

Though you can't put them on champions, souls occasionally feel like cheat codes—a soul named Ghastbud, once fully leveled up through Soul Savior's meta-progression system, applies Titanite, Damage Shield 4, Endless, and -2 energy cost to a unit. Mimic straight-up gives you a second champion from your allied clan. I like the way that many of the 33 souls feel like new verbs, not just simply +1'd versions of existing upgrades. Metamind adds an upgrade slot to a spell each time it's played, opening the door to absurd gigaspells. Souls can also be swapped mid-run, which meaningfully alters which units you draft and where you deploy them.

These new forms of power are necessary because, and I cannot stress this enough, the enemies in Soul Savior are absolutely juiced. One of the first basic enemies you encounter gains decaying multistrike (a new status called burst) when hit, pressuring you to kill it in as few hits as possible before it waltzes up to your pyre with something like 20x4 attack. There are bosses with triple-digit attack and trample. Bosses that reduce the capacity of your floor. Frontline annoyances that apply dazed to your unit if you kill them.

Again, I appreciate the work Shiny Shoe has done to add so much new stuff to an already big game, not just rearrange what's already there. An enemy called Mother's Zephyrite behaves in a particularly unique and devious way, gaining burst when it moves, descending on slay and gaining armor 10. In other words, if it kills one of your units, it sticks around longer and gets more powerful. Are there no rules of war on this divine train battlefield?

My first seven or eight runs facing this menagerie of new and remixed enemies was a little disorienting. The amount of overlapping triggers and status effects in play at once (there are at least five new ones) is greater than the base game, which sometimes made it hard for me to unravel why a unit was surviving or dying.

But after 25 or 30 runs, that shakeup is what I've come to appreciate about Soul Savior: it's upended some of my well-worn Monster Train 2 habits. Some strategies still work (I used a trio of Spore Launchers with Dualism to overload the final boss, the Lifemother, with decay), but familiar ones are disrupted. Enemies with the new Sniper status, for example, single out your rearmost unit, dealing damage only to them, cancelling whatever glass cannon you might've positioned there.

The power increase on both sides of the train has translated to spiky runs where I win big or lose big. On some Soul Savior playthroughs I've built up such hilariously lethal units (seen in my screenshots within the article) that the cards I play stop mattering, but on higher difficulties I sometimes lose so quickly that I'm unsure whether a run was winnable with the souls and clans I picked.

So for the most part, Soul Savior is refreshingly difficult—its second difficulty level (of three) is harder than a Covenant 10 Titan run. The other layer of fresh pain the mode throws at you are curses, negative global effects like persistent unit damage or reduced floor capacity that stack up as a counterbalance to souls. I think newer players to Monster Train 2 could be overwhelmed by the volume of stuff to keep in your head as a run progresses (both the Lifemother and her four miniboss children have three variations), but overall I'm pleased with Shiny Shoe's willingness to crank up the train pain in service of renewing the experience.

Two minor criticisms: the way the overworld map nodes are arranged in Soul Savior rubbed me the wrong way. The mode always gave me many more unit drafts than I needed, and somehow it felt harder than it should to pick up base upgrades for units or spells at the right time.

I'd also say that souls unlock surprisingly quickly, a little faster than I'd like them to. After two wins (and a few unsuccessful runs) against the Lifemother, I'd unlocked 19 of the 33 souls, and had upgraded versions of 12 of them. Each soul has three tiers of upgrading. So there are comfortably tens of hours on offer to fully level up your souls in Soul Savior, but not a sprawling career-sized experience equal to filling out your logbook for all (formerly) 180 clan combinations.

Luckily the Railforged and Wurmkin have expanded that facet of the base game. Out February 2, the package is a no-brainer at the respectful $10 price, and generously widens this moreish deckbuilder—the best in gaming. It'll hold that title for me until another deckbuilder lets me use mass-produced steampunk spiders, each wielding giant hammers that generate gold coins and armor every time they swing, to obliterate the corrupted mother of creation.

I had upset the peasantry by, er, murdering quite a lot of them. To be fair, they were about to hang a deserter. To make things right I agreed to help with their protest against taxation, which is why they asked me to kill a barghest for its blood: "The green really pops on our protest signs." But I hadn't got to grips with the combat system yet and the barghest ended up collecting my blood instead, which is how Dandelion got yet another story of Geralt's many deaths to turn into a ballad.

Remember Reigns? Nerial's game of Tinder-esque swipe-based monarchical decisionmaking was massive in 2016, followed by a sequel called Reigns: Her Majesty and spin-offs in other settings. Reigns: Game of Thrones seemed like a particularly perfect fit with its stories of bastardry and beheadings.

Next month, in collaboration with CD Projekt, Nerial will release Reigns: The Witcher. Rather than reliving the short-lived reigns of cursed royals, each run is one of Dandelion's ballads about Geralt's adventures. Only I guess the bard's in his tragic era, because they all end with Geralt's death. (After the barghest, I was killed by a gnomish prank.)

Every decision you make can alter four values, all of which you want to keep near the middle to avoid disaster. Three of them represent how liked you are by a different faction: humans, non-humans, and sorcerers. The fourth represents your dedication to the witcher's path. In the original games it was a bit odd how the need to maintain balance led to diffidence—one of the four icons represented wealth, so you could die by being too rich. Here, the demand for balance suits Geralt's standoffish neutrality. You can only afford to get so involved, and then you have to back off and play the reluctant antihero.

When things go particularly wrong, battle breaks out. It's a little more complex than the back-and-forth duels of the original. It's a real-time dance, with Geralt hopping left and right at the bottom of a grid while icons fall toward him like Tetris blocks. Only instead of tetrominoes some of them are witcher's swords and some of them are your enemy's attacks.

You have to kind of dance between them, trying to land on the swords as they reach you and dodge the rest. Witcher signs can also appear on the grid to set off your abilities, and some monsters have special attacks—the bruxae lets loose a paralyzing scream that freezes you in place for instance.

Each run is like a string of sidequests. You catch a serial killer, protect a merchant, arm wrestle a guard, burn a wizard's tower, and are turned into a jade pendant so Yennefer can wear you to a banquet. Completing objectives gives you more cards for the next run and levels up Dandelion's bardic abilities. One of my next objectives is to find love, which makes it easier to please people and harder to annoy them—it's called Geralt the Bathed and its icon is two feet in a tub.

Like the protestors using barghest blood, it's the kind of silly but accurate touch that makes it clear Reigns: The Witcher is the work of people who get the appeal. It even plays the quest complete sound from The Witcher 3 at the end of your runs. While each of those runs only takes minutes, I can see myself losing hours to this. Reigns: The Witcher is out February 25 on PC and mobile.

Between the $1000 30th anniversary editions, the swath of licensed crossover sets, and the six discrete Dwight Schrute cards, the recent years of Magic: The Gathering have felt like Hasbro has abandoned any pretense of restraint—and its own shareholders seem to agree.

In a 76-page lawsuit filed in the US District Court of Rhode Island last week (via GoLocalProv), a group of investors allege that Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks, former Wizards of the Coast president Cynthia Williams, and company executives engaged in "breaches of their fiduciary duties as directors and/or officers of Hasbro" by devaluing the Magic brand, even as shareholders raised concerns about the ramifications of overprinting cards and sets.

In 2022, the lawsuit says, Bank of America issued a report concluding that Hasbro was "overproducing Magic cards, which have propped up Hasbro’s recent results but are destroying the long-term value of the brand." Despite questioning from shareholders and analysts, however, the lawsuit alleges that the defendants "repeatedly denied such speculation," issuing "materially false and misleading" statements during shareholder calls where those concerns were raised.

As a result, the plaintiffs claim Hasbro executives "caused the Company substantial harm by causing it to repurchase its own shares at artificially inflated prices," as Hasbro spent $125 million to repurchase approximately 1.4 million shares of its own stock from April 2022 to July 2022, when share values had been "artificially inflated" by the outpouring of new Magic sets.

"In total, this caused the Company to overpay for repurchases of its own stock by approximately $55.9 million," the lawsuit says, which became clear when the company announced declining financial results in following quarters.

Throughout that time, Hasbro maintained that "new Magic sets were to be printed to meet demand from new consumer segments," which the lawsuit says was "false and misleading."

"Hasbro’s strategy with regard to printing Magic cards was not as carefully thought out as portrayed," the lawsuit says. "The Company was in fact printing a volume of Magic sets which exceeded consumer demand; the Company’s inventory allocation management was problematic, particularly as it pertained to the Company’s printing strategy for Magic sets; the Company was overloading the market with Magic sets to generate revenue and to offset shortfalls within the Company; as a result of the Company’s overprinting of Magic sets, existing Magic cards were devalued; and the Company failed to maintain internal controls."

IGN reports that the lawsuit's 76 pages also include an allegation that Hasbro executives attempted to manufacture a perception of high demand for Magic's controversial $1000 30th anniversary set. Less than an hour after the set's release in 2022, Wizards of the Coast tweeted that "sale has concluded, and the product is currently unavailable for purchase," implying that—despite its exorbitant price—it was so sought after that the company almost immediately sold through its inventory.

In reality, the lawsuit says, the tweet was the result of a plan from Hasbro management to "pause" sales of the set if it seemed like negative perception was damaging its initial sales, artificially buoying the company's share values. According to testimonies from former employees, Hasbro had only sold a portion of the printed 30th anniversary sets when it stopped sales.

Some of those unsold sets, the lawsuit says, were later discovered in a Texas landfill. But hey, maybe somebody paid $1000 on reprints just to toss them in the trash. Who can say?

I was intrigued by deckbuilding card battler The Killing Stone when it was revealed during last year's Gamescom, but I didn't expect to be playing the latest game from former Bioshock bods Question quite so soon. But a new trailer reveals that The Killing Stone will be ready for business next month, and I'm beginning to think it might be one of the early bangers of 2026.

The Killing Stone is a card battler with demonic overtones that owes at least some of its soul to 2021's Inscryption. The meat of the experience is a simulated board-game where you play cards that come to life as little critters. These critters form up in a line on the board, fighting to destroy a lidless eye that represents each player's life. Destroy your opponent's eye and you can move on to the next battle. If your eye gets poked to oblivion on the other hand, well, let's just say the results aren't to your advantage.

Surrounding this mechanical core is a narrative meta-layer where you explore the spooky house of an old magus, researching upgrades to improve your chances of beating the game and entreating with its curious denizens. As you can hear in the trailer, the game boasts some hefty voice-acting talent, such as Critical Role's Liam O'Brien and Emma Gregory, who voices big bad Minthara in Baldur's Gate 3.

I took the demo for a wee spin earlier, and was pretty much immediately gripped. There's a pleasing tactility in placing creatures and watching them slash each other to a pulp, and it reveals its tactical potential pretty quickly too. My favourite feature, though, is how it lets you choose between contemporary English and an early modern dialect for both voice acting and text.

The latter option is, frankly, rad as hell. I would strongly recommend that you play with all the demons speaking in ornate, cod-Shakespearian rhetoric, as it fits the tone of the game so well. But I also respect Question giving players an option that's easier to parse, as not everyone's into characters prancing around saying words like "thou'st".

Anyway, I'm sold and I'm in and I want to play more. The Killing Stone releases on February 18, so you'll have time to play it before Resident Evil: Requiem lands about a week later.

Two years ago, Wizards of the Coast released a Fallout-themed Magic expansion, and it was good. (I went bad karma and played a Caesar deck. Don't judge me.) While it included characters and events from across the games, it came out a month before the well-loved TV series began and so didn't feature any of the show's cast. That'll be rectified in a set of four "Secret Lair" drops later this month that return to the world of Fallout, one of them highlighting the stars of the TV show.

That particular drop will include cards based on The Ghoul, Maximus, and Lucy, who gets her own card as well as appearing on Spirit Mantle (emerging from the Super Duper Mart in her armored vault suit), and Pre-War Formalwear (in the chaos of the cornfield on her wedding night). Max technically gets a second appearance as well, since that's him inside the T-60 Power Armor, which gets its own card as well.

But it's not all TV tie-ins. There's also a batch of five New Vegas-themed cards, with Benny, Joshua Graham, The Platinum Chip, a Custom Caravan Deck, and a Sunset Sarsaparilla Machine all included. Like a lot of the cards in Magic's secret lairs, these are reskinned versions of existing cards, reusing their mechanics—the Sunset Sarsaparilla Machine, for instance, gives you Food tokens you can turn into Treasure just like the Nuka-Cola Vending Machine from the main Fallout set.

Dogmeat returns for five more cards, including a Sol Ring in case you need another one of those, only this time it's a dog's water bowl. And the Rad secret lair features mutant and mutation-themed cards like The Wise Mothman. The Rad Superdrop releases on January 26.

The Steam page for Forbidden Solitaire warns you to uninstall it "before it's too late." I saw this a few moments after closing the demo that just dropped today, so it's possible my PC is now haunted by unimaginable horrors. But as a Windows user in 2026, I've probably seen worse, so I'm just going to go ahead and tell you why I think this haunted little card game is worth the risk and we'll see if I survive until the end.

Forbidden Solitaire wastes no time before getting weird. I was only a few minutes into playing the demo when I was offered some upgrades by an eyeball in a wall. It followed my cursor around as I hovered over gems that I thought would be slotted into rings on the giant hand in the middle of the screen. But when I bought one, my character jammed it right into his flesh.

Forbidden Solitaire is solitaire if you could cheat by shoving gems into your hand because an eyeball told you to. My first upgrade let me undo my last move, which ended up being pivotal when I fought the fleshy mass of human skulls later on. I may not be particularly good at card games, but I can handle solitaire. All you need to know is how to pick cards that are one number higher or lower than the card in your hand. And in Forbidden Solitaire, each card you take off the board increases the amount of damage you deal to the enemy before it's their turn.

I don't know why the monsters in the dungeon you explore can be hurt by cards, and I doubt Forbidden Solitaire will ever tell me. You play as a character who found a CD-ROM of the game and decided to try it out on a PC from the '90s. Messages from a friend researching the controversy around the game occasionally pop up with links to things like FMV news footage of parents decrying the game for its violence: "Why is it so violent? It's fucking solitaire!" By the end of the demo, I had seen enough evidence of the game driving people mad that I wouldn't be surprised if it were hiding something from me.

As I cleared passageways blocked by piles of bones and tore the heart out of a shambling abomination with the unusual power of this game's version of solitaire, I couldn't tell if I was getting closer to revealing its secrets or if it was simply luring me closer to my own end.

But I was having so much fun playing cards that I forgot about the possible damage to my psyche. Sometimes cards show up that aren't cards at all. Key cards can be picked up and placed onto lock cards to reveal what's underneath, and there are cards that will instantly deal damage to your opponent or shield your health from their next attack. Other special cards help extend your turn by letting you remove multiple cards at once or reshuffle what's on the board before the enemy can even land a hit on you. Nothing feels better than chaining a bunch of moves together for one massive attack, and I suspect that will be vital to your survival in the final game.

Things got even weirder at the end of the demo when I started finding cursed cards that wouldn't go away until I matched with them twice. Forbidden Solitaire is as much of a card battler as it is a puzzle game. Each move you make could end your combo or jumpstart it, rewarding you for thinking several steps ahead. But you have to be flexible because you never know what cards will show up next and derail your plan. This tiny bit of friction is just enough to make every victory feel earned. For the hour I played Forbidden Solitaire, I felt like I was good at card games. And even if that turns out to be the demo giving me the illusion of confidence so that I go and play the real thing when it's out, I'd be happy to be lied to again.

If I could make it through Inscryption—another mysteriously meta card game with crunchy 3D graphics in the style of '90s PC games—I can make it through Forbidden Solitaire. Or at least I will try my best because I'm committed to finding out what lies deeper in the dungeon, and what makes the game so forbidden after all.

A tough new play format and an anvil-slapping set of new units are coming in early February for 2025's best card game.

Monster Train 2's first paid DLC, Destiny of the Railforged, will add a new clan to the game, the Railforged, as well as an expansive new mode called Soul Savior. And outside of this paid update, one of the original Monster Train's clans is also being added to Monster Train 2 for free. No price has yet been announced for the DLC.

I spoke with Mark Cooke, founder and CEO of Shiny Shoe about Destiny of the Railforged, how this ambitious new mode works, and what mechanics the new clan brings to bear.

The new mode, Soul Savior

Monster Train 2 takes place in heaven, but the new mode, Soul Savior, plays out in a spacey, ethereal realm called the Soulstream, where you fight to reclaim souls from a final boss called the Lifemother.

The mode isn't a novelty side attraction, but a fresh way of playing Monster Train 2 that the studio wants to be equal in depth and complexity to the main game.

Cooke says that the studio wanted to creatively explore a new format of play, but not take the approach they took in Monster Train 1, where DLC altered the way that a standard run worked. Making a separate type of run allows the studio to introduce "a bunch of new mechanics so we can isolate those things and make that as cool as we possibly can without interfering with the way that the base game works," he says.

Souls are indeed an imaginative new system: they're unique, permanently unlocked boons that enhance cards or units, or that take the form of global buffs, similarly to artifacts.

As you play runs of Soul Savior, you'll permanently unlock souls, a new form of meta progression. Each soul has a different criteria to unlock or upgrade, representing "tens of hours" to fully collect and upgrade them all, says Cooke. Initially you'll bring in one soul when starting a new run, later unlocking the ability to bring in multiple.

Souls are generally more powerful than standard card upgrades. Cooke tells me about a soul type called Butterball that you can attach to a unit that allows that unit to be consumed like a morsel to absorb its stats. It's sort of like transforming a unit into Primordium, Umbra's edible champion.

Other souls include Red Hot, which makes a spell explosive and gives it +30 magic power, then grants -2 to a random card in your hand if it slays an enemy. A soul called Heartbreaker should work well with damage shield or stacks of reanimate: it gives your unit fragile and reanimate 2, but applies fragile to the non-boss enemy that killed that unit. The soul Goldie works sort of like a money-generating Holystone: it grants a card holdover, and that card produces 10 gold per ember cost when played.

Another way that souls differ from standard card upgrades is their flexibility—souls can be moved between cards mid-run to make adjustments, presumably to help you counter specific fights. There are over 30 souls in total, and they can each be permanently upgraded three times.

Adding to the list of differences, Soul Savior is non-linear. Players attack the Lifemother's Children one by one, in the order of their choosing, a format that the studio likens to Mega Man's boss selection structure. Each child is preceded by a fight that will feature familiar bosses and enemies from the base game that have been corrupted by the Lifemother, "remixed," Cooke says, with new mechanics.

And when you defeat one of these four children, you'll earn a benefit and a curse, both of which persist for the rest of the run. A benefit takes the form of an in-run upgrade to one of the location nodes, like an improved Trinket Shop that might now sell boss artifacts. Curses include new effects like Witherbloom, which damages one of your units each turn, as well as friendly units adjacent to that unit. Another curse, called Insecure, causes champions to enter the battle with three stacks of melee weakness.

Cooke tells me that Soul Savior, which is only available by purchasing the DLC, will be more difficult at a baseline than a standard run of Monster Train 2 because you accumulate power over time by unlocking and upgrading souls. "As someone who's played a lot of Monster Train, it's nice to get beat up a little bit," Cooke says. "There's a number of new enemy status effects and mechanics that really you've gotta pay attention to, otherwise you're going to be in trouble."

There aren't Covenant difficulty levels in Soul Savior, however. Instead there are three selectable, unlockable tiers of difficulty. Soul Savior will also be slightly longer than a standard run.

It's an ambitious reconfiguration of Monster Train 2's ruleset, and I like the idea of a novel mode of play that has a different rhythm than the game's standard runs. Cooke says Soul Savior was a creative challenge to produce and balance. "Not only do we have all this meta progression and different objectives, then you can also visit all of the battles in different order, so it required rearchitecting some aspects of how the game works to support balancing in a new way. It has been more challenging, I would say, than the base game in some ways because of that structural difference. But we think it offers a different kind of experience that's a lot of fun."

The new clan, Railforged

Along with Soul Savior, the DLC will introduce the first post-launch clan to Monster Train 2, the Railforged, a faction of "tinkerers, creators, and mechanics" led by the champions Heph and Herzal, who until now had only been seen in the background of Monster Train 2's story. "We wanted to try and build a clan that was based around their themes, their lore, and what they bring to the overall Monster Train world," says Cooke.

These characters created the trains and the train stewards, and their capabilities focus on that equipment and machinery. The Railforged have ways to boost the attack power of the pyre itself, and their unit lineup includes "improved Train Steward-type units" like the Knuckler Steward, "a boxing Train Steward who can deliver a mean punch," says Cooke.

Another unit in their deck is the Sentry Turret, a big cannon that can't move, but automatically fires on any enemy unit that moves nearby it, triggering based on effects like shift or advance.

Central to the Railforged is a unique mechanic called Forge, a new in-combat resource they can accumulate and spend to enhance the health and attack of units or pieces of equipment as they're deployed.

"[Forge] can affect the order you play units in… sometimes you do want to hold a unit to try to capitalize more on Forge if you think you can build it up," Cooke explains. Unless you count the handful of cards that expend dragon eggs or gold, Railforged is the first clan with an in-combat spendable resource.

Like other MT2 champions, Herzal and Heph have three upgrade paths. One of Heph's allows her to equip multiple pieces of equipment at the same time, opening the door to the insane, expensive prospect of attaching two pieces of merged equipment to one unit. One of Herzal's paths, Cooke tells me, gives him an ability called Pyrespeak, an activated ability that gives you a card that causes the pyre to attack the room he's in.

Cooke sees the Railforged as a bit more of an offensively-oriented clan. Railforged will bring a new status effect, Burst, a kind of multistrike that decays over time, but can be built up. The Railforged have no sweeper units.

The Railforged should excel at augmenting the power of other clans. "With Forge, unit-oriented clans can be quite good. They're good with Lazarus League because there's a lot of equipment flying around with Graft. So you can boost all the Graft equipment if you so wish with Forge points. It definitely feels like a great utility clan in general."

Adding to the list of new content: some rooms will now have abilities that can be manually activated. Returning to MT2 is the card Steel Pulleyclaw, now taking the form of a room that will allow you to grab and pull units from any room to the room that Steel Pulleyclaw is installed into. Yoink.

The Wurm's turn

Arriving simultaneously with the DLC as an entirely free update to the base game will be the Wurmkin clan, Monster Train 1's wormy, multi-legged, egg-hatching uglies.

Like the other MT1 clans, the Wurmkin will be getting a total design refresh, including room and equipment cards of their own, a new clan card, and modified balance. "We know that a lot of players have requested [the Wurmkin] and we wanted to say thank you to our player community by adding that in as well," says Cooke.

Expect all of this to arrive sometime in early February. Shiny Shoe is granting me early access to Soul Savior and the Railforged soon, and I'll have a story coming at the end of this month with my thoughts based on playing.

In a move that future legal scholars will surely brand 'the matador approach,' Palworld—currently embroiled in a lawsuit with Nintendo over its various similarities to the Pokémon series—is launching a trading card game.

Created in partnership with Bushiroad and releasing July 30 this year, the Palworld Official Card Game "is a 2-player competitive card game where you can enjoy strategic and tactical battles through deploying various unique Pals." Which, so far you could swap out the word "Pals" for "Pokémon" and have a perfectly accurate description of the Pokémon TCG.

But it is different, I promise. From the blurb, it sounds like basebuilding will form a key part of the whole Palworld Official Card Game experience, much as you can in the videogame. "Players fight alongside their Pal companions, gathering resources, and building bases as they aim for victory. These adorable and dependable Pals will utilize their own unique traits to lead you to victory."

And that's about all there is to know at this point, though you can watch a video where a bunch of different Pals burst out of playing cards if that appeals. I suspect Pocketpair will reveal more details according to its own schedule as the release date approaches.

With Nintendo going after Pocketpair, claiming that the studio has infringed multiple of its lawsuits, the move to announce a Pokémon-esque card game feels like Palworld deliberately poking the bear.

Which, to be clear, it probably isn't. It would be a phenomenally bad idea to purposefully spit in Nintendo's eye while court proceedings are ongoing, and it's likely that Pocketpair's had these kinds of plans for a while, perhaps even since before Nintendo threw down the gauntlet.

But you have to admit, intentional or not, it is quite funny.

Lorwyn Eclipsed is an upcoming Magic: The Gathering expansion that returns to the dual planes of Lorwyn and Shadowmoor—a pair of fairylands that used to switch pre-eminence in a 300-year cycle, in which the whimsical eternal-daylight realm of Lorwyn would trade places with the dark and spooky Shadowmoor. Now the two lands exist side by side, but anyone who crosses from one to the other is transformed, no longer quite the same person (or elf or boggart) they were on the other side.

This duality is demonstrated in a short film called One Light, One Dark that's basically a Magic-themed Muppet musical, with characters designed by Jim Henson's Creature Shop singing about how different their lives are on either side of the twilight border. On the one side, they playfully squeeze frogs. On the other, they murder pigeons. Swings and roundabouts, really.

It's delightful is what it is. And while it's also a perfect opportunity for the Fun Police to say how this proves Magic is better when it concentrates on its original setting rather than crossovers, I think I'd be even more stoked if this was a Muppets/Labyrinth/Dark Crystal set. Maybe we'll get a Secret Lair Drop with David Bowie as the Goblin King, that'd be neat.

Mechanically, Lorwyn Eclipsed is adding a keyword called Vivid that varies effects based on how many different colors you're playing (to emphasize the bright rainbow sunshine-funtimes of Lorwyn), while Blight lets you plague your opponent with -1/-1 counters (to represent Shadowmoor's nastiness). There's also a returning concept from the original Lorwyn set, with the Changeling attribute letting a shapeshifter enjoy the effects of any bonuses that would normally only apply to a specific creature.

Lorwyn Eclipsed will be out digitally in Arena on January 20, and physically on January 23 with the usual array of themed Commander decks and booster packs.

I've spent the past several weeks mildly obsessed with Pluribus, the new Apple TV show from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan. A highlight of the series is the arresting performance from lead actor Rhea Seehorn, who plays one of the only normal humans left after most of the world suddenly merges into an eerily polite gestalt consciousness.

Seehorn is best known for starring alongside Bob Odenkirk in Better Call Saul, but her work stretches back into the '90s. As it turns out, one of her earliest live action roles was in, of all things, a Magic: The Gathering game by Microprose.

It is as hilarious, blurry, and gloriously low-budget as you'd hope. All the hallmarks of cheesy '90s PC game fantasy are on proud display here, with the actors superimposed over primitive CG backgrounds.

The full tutorial appears to contain well over an hour of dictated instruction and probably isn't the best way to learn a notoriously complex card game (especially since this is nearly 30 years old), but it's admirably committed to the bit. Any video of the tutorial is now festooned with comments mentioning Seehorn's character in Pluribus, jokingly factoring the role into the show's canon.

You might know the game as Shandalar, since there are all sorts of digital Magic: The Gathering adaptations and this one took place in, well, Shandalar. Unlike most MTG videogames, it featured a full singleplayer campaign where you run around defeating magic users and building a deck with each victory. It's a game PC Gamer contributing writer Dominic Tarason called "mind-bendingly expansive" for the time in his article on some of PC gaming's unsung heroes.

Seehorn talked about her role in Shandalar briefly in an interview with NPR, where she said the whole thing was "so low-budget that they didn't have shoes, but they wanted us to look like we were wearing kind of gladiator sorcerer boots or whatever, so we're just wearing tube socks with electrical tape in criss cross fashion." When the interviewer mentioned the tutorial was easily accessed on YouTube, Seehorn burst into laughter and reeled back in her chair.

She continued in the interview: "I was so excited that my photo was on the back that I went to Best Buy … and I was like 'This is me! Oh my God, I did that, that's me!' And I was like, 'Would you give me a copy?' and they were like, 'No. What is wrong with you?'"

Slay the Spire certainly turned heads when it released, immediately cementing itself as one of the best deckbuilders in town and helping to kick off a trend that persists today. That was nearly seven years ago at this point, but the game is turning even more heads today: it just hit an all-time concurrent player peak on Steam, according to SteamDB.

Remarkably, it's not even close. Its previous peak is from when it released into early access in 2018, at just over 33,000 players, and this holiday season has brought it screaming past 57,000 a few hours before I wrote this article (it's settled down to about 35,000 now—still a notch above the old record). The game has been good the whole time, but there are a few probable causes for this sudden surge in spire slaying.

As SteamDB notes, the 2025 winter sale brought Slay the Spire to a historic low of $2.49; while the site only records sale history two years back, I don't recall it ever being quite this cheap. As everyone rushes to burn their Steam wallets on the best deals, such an acclaimed game for the price of a pack of gum is a no-brainer.

There's also Slay the Spire 2 on the horizon, which we crowned our "most wanted" game at this year's PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted. It seems natural that prospective players and returning vets alike would want to dive into the original as they prepare for the eagerly-awaited sequel. And hey, maybe some new converts trickled in via the Slay the Spire board game, which holds an impressive 8.7/10 user rating on BoardGameGeek.

Ultimately, it's also just a great game currently withstanding the test of time. As PC Gamer's Evan Lahti said in his review, it's a "genre-bending achievement" that "puts absolutely broken combos within your grasp." That's a timeless strain of joy, and hopefully we'll be seeing a lot more of it come Slay the Spire 2.

If you'd like to join the player pile-up, Slay the Spire is available for $2.49 on Steam.

‘Deckbuilders meet Dark Souls!’ is the kind of ironically-soulless pitch that makes me want to go back in time and drown a young Miyazaki in a poisonous swamp. Fortunately, Death Howl hasn’t been made by evil money men, but slightly-less evil developers who clearly understand what makes good deckbuilders and soulslikes tick. Even if they’re slightly too infatuated with a difficulty curve they purchased from the rectangle factory.

I thought all deckbuilders had to be roguelikes by law, so it’s paradoxically a little refreshing to play one that follows a more traditional game structure. You play a grieving mother who’s in denial about her young son’s death (oh, Merry Christmas by the way!) and who’s chased him into the spirit realm in the hopes of getting him back. Looks like somebody only played the first half of Shadow of the Colossus…

Unfortunately, the spirit realm likes its new boy, and so keeps chucking monsters at you. Turn-based battles play out on isometric grids reminiscent of the excellent Into the Breach. Each turn you draw five cards and then have five mana to play them with. Ah, but you also need that mana to move around, creating a dilemma between hitting your foes or running away to hide in the corners like a coward.

Sadly there’s no sign of Into the Breach’s undo button. In true Soulslike tradition, death is the main teacher here. The game gives you a lot of information but is intentionally—and irritatingly—vague about how enemy attacks are going to work until the moment they’re killing you. Expect an aggressive onboarding period as you learn how different monsters operate.

At least your starting cards are nice and straightforward. Strikes shove enemies into adjacent squares, arrow-shooting and rock-chucking handles distant threats, sprint helps you run away, and armor helps when you’ve cornered yourself yet again, dummy. Win a fight and all the fallen enemies become death howls. These can be combined with stuff you keep finding on the floor into new cards, or banked at healing points to buy upgrades on a small skill tree. This choice can be agonising, particularly early on when the game keeps throwing enemies at you that your basic starter cards just aren’t up to countering.

Yes, Death Howl can be a real jerk. You drop all your precious death howls when you die and, of course, all enemies respawn when you heal. It’s not long before you start having to fight multiple battles in a row, with no healing in-between, and with cards that do heal you more elusive than a Half Life 3 release date.

I’d say that’s pain enough. Death Howl responds to me saying that by cutting out my tongue. You have to physically pick up your dropped death howls on the combat grid within a set amount of turns or they’ll disappear forever, often forcing you to stroll into fatal lines of fire. Oh, and if an enemy picks up your death howls first they’ll get a buff, making an encounter you just failed even harder. The first draft of this review was just a thousand swearwords with an occasional cameo from the weeping emoji.

Things improve massively when you stop trying to create an uber-deck that can take on everything and realise there’s a reason the game has tons of slots for crafting different ones. Before repeating a battle, you can swap decks out and make adjustments, removing chaff that isn’t working and slotting in a few cards that hopefully will. Well, so long as you’ve grinded enough death howls and crafting materials to make said cards already, naturally.

Each region of the map has its own distinct cards. While you can use cards from other regions, Death Howl is sadly a consistent enough bastard to punish you for it. They’ll cost an extra crucial point of mana to play, instantly transforming your lovingly-curated deck that just got you through a fair chunk of the game into an expensive unplayable mess. Christ, Monster Train 2 was about the citizens of Hell, and it didn’t treat me as nastily as this.

But the most irritating thing of all is that I kinda love it. I’m not ruling out Stockholm syndrome or that my New Year’s resolution should probably be to find Death Howl and myself a good couple’s therapist, but it has successfully broken me out of one of my worst deckbuilder habits. I’m a sucker for sticking to a once-winning strategy long after it’s peaked. Death Howl rightly has no time for such nonsense.

I had an outstanding strength deck going. It was rendered meaningless in an area where everyone apparently owned shares in an armor company. So I had to start over with craftable cards that inflict armor-ignoring poison damage but that also often injure you in the process. Self flagellation to succeed this time, is it, Death Howl? That tracks, and now I have to begrudgingly concede that my evil self-spiting toxic deck is probably my favorite in the game.

The skill tree has to be restarted in each region too, because of course it bloody does. Each region has an unlockable power, like a temporary strength boost, or—oh praise be—restoring your health. Another crucial branch of the tree unlocks spirit cards that get added to your hand whenever you defeat an enemy, and these can be genuinely game-changing. Finally taking out a monster that’s been ruining your life for the last hour and then being rewarded by being able to use their attack on all its friends makes all that pain worth it. Just.

Even though that extra mana cost can be crippling, there’s nothing stopping you from sticking a few expensive cards from other regions in your deck, which opens up the combat possibilities massively. Regions also have a nice habit of looking small, only to reveal hidden caves, routes, and even the inside of a friendly whale. (True, that friendly whale looks like it was designed by David Cronenberg on an ecstasy comedown, but take what you can get here.)

The more you explore and plunder, the more cards you’ll discover, naturally. You’ll want to wander around anyway, as it’s a fine-looking adventure with a welcome surreal streak. A cliff suddenly sprouting a realistic-looking nose doesn’t quite take the sting off losing all my death howls yet again, but it doesn’t hurt.

It’s a well-told tale, too. Given the subject matter, this could easily have been a melodramatic pummeling of the heartstrings or a grimdark misery-fest. Instead it’s surprisingly compassionate, occasionally even funny, and clearly written with a big heart. Bigger than the heart of whoever made those horrible one-hit-kill jellyfish, anyway.

Like most bullies, Death Howl isn’t perfect. Grinding to get an inroad in new areas can get tedious, and some enemy attacks are cheaper than getting someone a PC Gamer subscription for Christmas. But persevere and you’ll find a rewarding game that reminded me why I fell unhealthily in love with soulslikes and deckbuilders in the first place.

If there's one thing I love about card games, it's the absolutely obscene sentences that come out of explaining play-by-plays to the uninitiated, especially when you're playing a game with licensed characters. For example: Disney's Lorcana once had a combo with minor character Hiram Flaversham that elevated him to godhood via banishing and re-summoning a popsicle.

Now a new sentence has emerged: Magic: The Gathering's new Marvel set has a combo where you make the Incredible Hulk so, so very angry by forcing the poor guy to step on spiky caltrops over and over and over again, hurting his poor feetsies.

As spotted by Wargamer, you do need to put in a little work here—the card starts off as an un-crashed out Bruce Banner that has to be transformed with six mana. Once he's all green'd up, though, there's a crucial bit of rules text: "Enrage—Whenever The Incredible Hulk is dealt damage, put a +1/+1 counter on him. If he's attacking, untap him and there is an additional combat phase after this phase."

Combine this with Caltrops, which deals one damage when a creature attacks, and you start to see the vision: The Hulk crashes into an enemy, roaring, frothing at the mouth. He takes a step back and steps on a little itty-bitty piece of metal. He loses his gourd. He attacks them again. He steps back, and—god damnit, those Caltrops are still there.

This is what we call an "infinite". It's not a completely unavoidable one: If you've got enough "blockers", creatures who can soak up damage in play, then ramming The Incredible Hulk into them will eventually kill him. The +1 to its health each combat phase from Enrage is negated by Caltrops, after all.

However, as Wargamer notes, there are cards that can get around this—like Moonmist, which transforms Bruce Banner into the Hulk immediately, though with the caveat that combat damage is completely prevented for the turn, unless they're a Werewolf or a Wolf.

Fun fact, though: Caltrops doesn't deal combat damage. So you could just spend your Moonmist-neutered turn sending the Hulk out to stomp on legos until he is strong enough to one-hit KO anything in the known universe on his next turn. Again: One of those new sentences, you love to see it. From what I've heard about M:TG, finding obnoxious new strategies is part of the fun.

Deckbuilding roguelike Slay the Spire hasn't left the PC Gamer Top 100 since it came out despite inspiring hundreds of imitators, a testament to how precisely it bullseyed assembling a hand of cards so powerful you become a god. Now it seems the game most likely to usurp it is Slay the Spire 2, which is coming in March 2026—though there was apparently a 50% chance that the indie team at Mega Crit Games would never make a sequel.

"We had been working on a bunch of tiny projects, little prototypes, and were having fun but said 'okay, let's get together again,'" Mega Crit co-founder Anthony Giovannetti told PC Gamer in an interview for The PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted. This was during Covid, when the two were ready to tackle a project they could really sink their teeth into. That project being another Slay the Spire was not a given, despite having sold well over a million copies by then.

"We had different paths we could work on," Giovanetti said. "One was a completely different project, and one was the sequel. I thought there were some interesting design challenges to work on a sequel with. We ended up flipping a coin, actually, and Slay the Spire 2 won out. So we started working on it, and the rest is history."

The co-founders are serious about the coin toss: they really would've made a different game had it landed Spire side down. Despite how huge a decision that seems to be—and I guess due to the whole pandemic thing—they didn't actually even do the coin toss in person.

"I don't think I actually saw the coin," Giovannetti said. "I want to say we were in a Discord call, and I think he just told me the result of the coin, which, in retrospect, is maybe questionable. But I believe he told me the true result. I think Casey would've massively preferred the coin went the other way, because I was always the card game person, and he was the action game person."

Still, Yano said there were reasons he was up for making a sequel, even if he was drawn to the project represented by the flip side of the coin. Slay the Spire felt like "unfinished business" to an extent, as later updates to the game had become laborious as they tried to keep console and mobile ports in sync with the PC version. Starting with fresh tech would make it easier to execute ideas they still had for a deckbuilder.

"I'm not really a future thinker," he said. "I don't really think about the next few years. I'm kind of a people pleaser—I just want to make things that I think people want. It seemed like a good idea. It might take a few years, maybe I was thinking we could finish it earlier, but here we are four-and-a-half years later, and we're still working on it."

Slay the Spire 2 will launch into early access in a few months with more of everything in it, though Yano said he's "such a spoiler hater" that he's hesitant to say much more than that.

"There are a lot of bosses already, a lot of enemies, a lot of events—probably more than the first game just on early access launch," he said. "I guess the starting line is kind of like the finishing line for the first game."

GameStop's been on a roll with bizarre trade-ins as of late. After announcing "Trade Anything Day," an idea that sounds more like a sketch comedy bit than a real thing, it has awarded a record-setting payout of over $30,000 to a customer who handed in a "fully authenticated PSA 10 Holo Gengar." It's also really excited to use this moment in "GameStop history" to denounce its greatest enemy: digital distribution the trolls.

This all comes from a post on X where GameStop announced the historic trade, which it calls "the most valuable single trade-in ever recorded" at any GameStop location. It goes on to say "Furthermore, any trolls who publicly claim that GameStop trade-in values are bad are hereby factually and demonstrably incorrect. Any prior and ongoing objections to our trade values are now deemed without merit and factually invalid."

It's a benign jibe and a neat story, I suppose, especially for whoever decided to hold on to that Gengar. That said, the implicit argument against detractors doesn't really follow; most people aren't going to try to bring in anything more valuable than an old console, a used game, or a batch of dust-stained Amiibo. And as Polygon spotted in its story on this, Battlefield 6 is less than two months old and only gets you $27.50 in trade-in credit.

With most things, you'll usually have more luck selling directly to somebody who wants it than to a storefront that may eventually be able to do it for you; a Pokémon card worth five figures is a definite exception to that, given how small the market for such a thing is. The real question is how one expects to spend that much credit at GameStop in a lifetime. By buying an even rarer Gengar, I suppose?

I'm probably reading too much into the tone of an X post from GameStop, which has historically revved up its irreverent humor whenever it's gotten the chance.

Last week Magic: the Gathering announced its Monster Hunter collaboration, to which PC Gamer's Lincoln Carpenter replied "hell yeah." But after MTG shared details on the long-awaited Secret Lair drop, the internet replied—and I'm paraphrasing here—hell no. Now Wizards of the Coast is delaying the set so it can get it right.

As the company announced in a blog post titled "Back to the Drawing Board with Secret Lair x Monster Hunter," the superdrop is delayed until some point in 2026. "Let's cut to the chase," the post reads. "[The drop] we revealed last week fell short of expectations. We heard loud and clear that you were disappointed, and we believe we can do better. So, we're going to postpone this release and rework this Superdrop entirely."

Nobody likes delays, but this one comes as some consolation to fans who were disappointed by the initial reveal. As Reddit user Sweet-Breadfruit6460 stated in a popular thread on the Magic subreddit: "At least they're listening but what possessed them to release that shit in the first place?"

You may be wondering where this all went wrong; Magic and Monster Hunter should get on like bread and butter. As Lincoln noted in his above article, both are basically extravagant excuses for world-class artists to render giant, awesome lizards. Well, if you're unfamiliar, Secret Lair is Wizards' line of collaborations that involves re-releasing old cards with altered thematics and art, but identical mechanics—and for Monster Hunter fans online, the chosen cards for this drop lack flavor and value.

As Polygon spotted, Reddit threads popped up all over deriding the set. This thread from user ferretlike cried out "WHERE ARE THE CATS" and pointed out that the pairings of card and Monster Hunter character seemed arbitrary. As ferretlike wrote: "This was supposed to be easy, why does Zinogre play with graveyard, why does Brachydios care about instant speed?" Commenter Buldaboy said further down in the thread, "They don't care … I could make a better Monster Hunter Secret Lair in seconds."

Even those more concerned with the reprinted cards than the crossover were puzzled by the announcement, as the drop mostly consisted of low-value cards in low demand. A popular thread on the MTG finance subreddit called it "the worst drop of the year" as commenters discussed how cheap the selected cards generally were. User Evadude said in the thread, "I'm in the group that are getting these because we love Monster Hunter. But as a player I am disappointed."

In its aforementioned blog, Wizards said it wouldn't redo Secret Lairs very often, noting that "Capcom is on board for us to take another swing." Further details on the updated drop will be shared sometime next year.

Back in August 1994, not long after Doom had pulled PC gaming blinking into the spotlight, Magic: The Gathering released a small expansion named The Dark. Comprising just 119 cards, the set was unique for how it upended the traditional depiction of Magic's mana colours. Most notably, it radically reinterpreted white mana cards—normally presented as angelic and peaceful—with scenes of religious fanaticism and violence.

It has long been believed that the cards' designs were influenced by the Satanic Panic, which Magic itself was caught up in after its release in 1993. But only recently has this been confirmed. Just before Halloween, Magic's original art director Jesper Myrfors took to Facebook and laid out the design philosophy behind the cards, writing "The Magic: The Gathering release The Dark was 100% a commentary on the evils and hypocrisy of bigoted right wing Christians.

"Having gone through the idiotic Satanic Panic of the '80s and then listening to their moronic and unfounded pearl clutching arguments that MTG promoted 'devil worship' I had had enough and decided to hold up a mirror to them," Myrfors continued. This, he says, is why White is "represented as dangerous, dogmatic and unempathetic in the set," adding that "White in The Dark glorifies ignorance, mob mentality and violence against those who are different."

Myrfors provided further context in an interview with Polygon, discussing the direct influence the Satanic Panic had on him as a teenager and an avid Dungeon & Dragons fan. "When I was about 15, my friends' parents told me I couldn't hang out with them anymore because they thought I was into Satanism," he recalled. "At that age, that really hurts. You're too young to defend yourself."

As time passed, all of this "bubbled up" in Myrfors, until he eventually decided to "poke back" at the religious right. And an opportunity quickly arose. The release of Magic's third expansion, Legends, saw the game explode in popularity, to the point where Wizards of the Coast had an "internal panic" because they lacked something to follow it up.

Hence, Myrfors quickly set about producing The Dark, confident that Wizards of the Coast would accept it because "the clock was ticking". Not only was he right, The Dark seemed to chime with unspoken sentiments the rest of the team had. "I’m sure they could tell what the direction of the set was. But all of them had lived through the Satanic Panic too. We’d all been victims of those false accusations, so I think everyone appreciated it on some level."

A more modern example of what Myrfors saw during the Satanic Panic is Stephen Dollins, a former pro-wrestler and self-proclaimed "prophet" who has accused everything from Pokemon Cards to the Tooth Fairy as being linked to Satanism. One of Dollins' earliest targets was Magic, where he suggested that the mana circle on the reverse of Magic's cards was evidence of hidden pentagrams. "He pointed to the mana circle on the back and what 'they' did," Myrfors explains, with 'they' referring to Magic's purportedly devil-worshipping design team. "But for the record, there is no 'they'. I was 100% in charge of the look and feel of that game."

As for why Myrfors has chosen to reveal this information now, he doesn't say explicitly. But in his original Facebook post, he writes about how he sees history repeating itself:

"The truth is that people who view themselves as virtuous and righteous can be as deadly and dangerous as any blood sacrificing devil cult when they forget the message of love that is supposed to be the foundation of their belief system," he wrote in the original Facebook post. "We can see that replaying today with MAGA."

Elaborating further, Myrfors says the name of the expansion pack was "a reference to the Dark Ages, when the Church had full control of the population, when wise women and folk healers were burned as witches, education was only for the very elite and anybody who spoke up or strayed from the herd was killed in horrific ways." He worries that "even today people are trying to bring those dark days back. I was shining a light on them with this set."

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Stephen Dollins was one of the inspirations for The Dark expansion, but Myrfors was just using him as a modern example of the Satanic Panic.