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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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Slay the Spire, which I was unfamiliar with, appears to be a deck-builder game, which Wikipedia tells me were also invented in Japan (and certainly most of the most prominent franchises are from there)

This is incorrect on a few levels. Firstly, Slay the Spire is not a collectible card game - it really is the first in its genre of roguelite deckbuilders: games with largely independent short runs where players customize an initially simple deck of cards to defeat a series of enemies.

Even digital collectible card games' lineage is pretty independent of Japan. Magic: the Gathering is the proper progenitor of the customizable card game, and its digital versions are also the first of the type. The Japanese games mentioned at the top of the Wikipedia article's History section really only have the similarly of being digital games with collectible cards - not the actual gripping force of customizing decks and evolving card pools and mechanics.