I enjoy retrospectives that go through a topic in chronological order, especially for video games, a medium that is nothing if not iterative. I thought I’d start off using this space to examine the young but increasingly popular roguelike deck-building subgenre, in release order (or as close as is possible to determine).
To start, some criteria a game should meet to be up for consideration here:
- ‘Roguelike’: The game must prominently feature randomisation in how it offers exploration, skills, combat, and so on – with the intent of encouraging multiple runs and alternative playstyles.
- ‘Deck-building’: The game doesn’t necessarily have to feature cards per se, but the gameplay must prominently feature a mechanic similar to managing a loadout of cards in a collectible card game. For example, you should be able to gain and lose skills as gameplay progresses; there should be limitations on how these skills are gained, deployed, etc.
- ‘(Video) Game’: The game must be an original video game, rather than a digital adaptation of an existing physical card or board game.
Going by these, I’m going to start with 2013’s Coin Crypt. 2013 may seem surprisingly recent, but to my knowledge Coin Crypt is the first game that meets my criteria (please get in touch if you think differently). Remove the roguelike requirement, and we would have a few original deck-builder video games from the late 1990s, such as Chron X and Sanctum. Even with the requirement for it to be an ‘original’ video game, anything I will cover here will carry some influence from Magic: The Gathering or one of its mid-late ‘90s collectible card-game progeny, such as Netrunner or the Pokemon Trading Card Game. Perhaps the key inspiration for roguelike deck-building gameplay would be the 2008 board game Dominion. While the resource management can be traced to Magic’s mana system, Dominion has players build decks from cards semi-randomly collected as play progresses. As such, the key distinction for the roguelike deck-builder is in players finding emergent deck possibilities in cards that work well together as they collect and use them, rather than having time to plan a synergistic deck before battle begins.
Ultimately, the rabbit hole on projects like this can be made ever wider, but for the sake of relevance and manageability I’m casting a fairly narrow net. Even if we went all the way back to the genre namesake of Rogue (1985), that in itself was inspired by other mainframe computer takes on Dungeons & Dragons, which in turn was inspired by tabletop wargaming, which in turn was… it can’t be ruled out that all human culture probably stems from enjoyment found in swinging sticks at one another, or somesuch.
To conclude this introductory post: rather than an attempt to divine the exact genesis of the roguelike deck-builder, the aim here is to chronicle points of interest, similarity, difference, and evolution in a subgenre that saw an explosion of popularity with the early-access release of Slay the Spire in 2017 and continues to see a fascinating degree of variation in the wake of its success, even within my fairly fixed gameplay criteria. First game to follow.
Shrunken Shrine 
The term “roguelike” became official in 1993, primarily to mean a specific gameplay that was quite hard to describe, hence it was named after an early example of the genre (basically, Roguelikes are like Rogue, just like platformers are like Mario and FPS are like DOOM). Basically, a single-character immediate grid tactics game. Roguelikes are traditionally free, so they unfortunately are ignored by the commercial game industry, and after The Binding of Isaac took some remote inspiration from roguelikes, they instead started to use the word as a meaningless clickbait (if you mean a randomized game, why not just say “randomized game”?). Roguelike communities still use the word in meaning close to the original. (It is true that basically all roguelikes are randomized, and most people would consider it a necessary element for a roguelike, but randomization was always a common design in decision-making games, at least since card solitaire games from early 19th century, it is not something unique to roguelikes. Single-character grid tactics is.)
Deckbuilder is meant to highlight the differences between Dominion and CCGs that inspired it — basically, that “building the deck” is the core of the game, for example, in Dominion your deck changes in almost every turn, and your “bad” cards also remain in your deck, unless you use up your limited resources to get rid of them. A game like Dream Quest or Slay the Spire would not be a “pure” deckbuilder (the deck only changes between battles) but they still feel similar (building the deck is still the core of the game). I have not played Chron X or Sanctum, but from a quick search they seem to be digital CCGs, not deckbuilders. Sometimes the CCG mechanism is also called “deck construction” — you construct a deck from the cards you own before the run — that is very diffferent from a deckbuilder because you simply do not use your bad cards.
“Roguelike deckbuilder” was coined AFAIK by the dev of Dream Quest, and it does make sense because it does combine roguelike and deckbuilder elements — it obviously is a deckbuilder, and the map works quite similar to how it works in a roguelike (to be more precise, it is taken from Desktop Dungeons — I would not call Desktop Dungeons a roguelike because it is tactically very different, but it is quite close).
But with Slay the Spire “roguelike deckbuilder” basically became a clickbait. If you go by some loose interpretation (“run-based, randomized game”) then deckbuilders are that by definition (or almost by definition); Slay the Spire does not seem to have any element specific to roguelikes. And it became even worse later, with games having “roguelike deckbuilder” tag while being even less like Rogue than Slay the Spire, or definitely not deckbuilders.
There are lots of relevant terms in boardgames (engine builder, tableau builder, deck builder, deck construction, etc.) but gamedevs would label everything as a “roguelike deckbuilder”. People who enjoy such games are really missing out if they have never played a literal roguelike (e.g. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup), Dominion (which has a mostly free online implementation), or other boardgames.
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Thank you for your comprehensive comment that reaches further beyond my own post as to where the respective parts ‘roguelike’ and ‘deck-builder’ come from. In choosing the criteria for my posts, I accepted that they had to be narrow enough to have recognisable points of overlap while also being open enough to allow for interesting blends with other subgenres. In a post-Slay the Spire world, many games indeed adopted the tag in an effort to hop onto some of that popularity. However, those are also some of the more unusual rocks that people don’t turn over anymore once the hype dies down, so to speak. Indie games on PC don’t have quite as long tails as their console counterparts when it comes to retrospectives – something I’m trying to do my little part here to rectify.
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Yeah, I also do a bit of historical research into games, and it is quite mysterious to me how, like, console games from the 80s are remembered, but there were lots of cool games on 8-bit computers and other platforms that seem forgotten. Like, if you look for the history of “save game” feature, lots of source claim that the first game was Legend of Zelda (1986), but computer games had it for a long time (the earliest one I know is actually Rogue… and then people justify a game not having a way to save-and-quit by “it is a roguelike”). Or the “metroidvania” genre name, why refer to Metroid 1986 and CSotN 1997 when there were lots of earlier 8-bit computer games in similar style.
I think this might be because they still release new games in these series. Roguelikes typically get updated forever (DCSS is popular and gets new versions, and even NetHack and Angband do), but that seems less marketable.
Thanks for doing this, the interview with the Coin Crypt dev was very interesting! I think of my Hydra Slayer (originally from 2010) as a bit of predecessor to this, as it is a roguelike with less focus on grid tactics, more focus on fighting individual enemies using complex sequences of attacks, and that fighting being based on finding synergies between items you have in your very limited inventory. So that is a bit similar (but no draw mechanics — so actually more “tableau builder” than deckbuilder, but then, Backpack Hero is similar and has “roguelike deckbuilder” tag…). But I do not know if it has affected the famous games in any way.
(BTW you use the smiley in your art, but most roguelike communities and events use the “@” symbol, since it was what the original Rogue from 1980 and most ASCII roguelikes used.)
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I think a lot of this genre etymology just comes down to what sticks with increasingly larger groups of people. The people who made Super Metroid and Castlevania may have simply called those earlier games that inspired them ‘action-adventures’ (if they had titles for them at all), but because those two really took off amongst gamers of the time, the term ‘metroidvania’. Same with people being early into shooters calling them ‘Doom clones’ before and even bigger set of fans came in and started calling them FPS games.
Thanks for your continued interest and kind words on the interview! This is the first I’ve heard of your Hydra Slayer – looks great! Math very much isn’t my subject, but I’d love to know if it went on to influence anyone who played any of the games I’m covering here!
(I stuck with the smiley for the sake of being a more readily-recognisable face, haha. Perhaps I’ll make another variant someday.)
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