Anki Study Break: Slay the Spire

By Nymvaline

A while ago, I made a mod for the game Slay the Spire that pauses1 the game in between every2 floor to make sure you do 103 reviews on Anki before it will allow you to continue playing.

Get the mod from the Steam Workshop here.

What it’s for

I use Anki for flashcards for memorizing various facts. Sometimes, I play a game, and tell myself that at every pause, I’ll do a couple of cards.

But I usually cheat, and skip a pause, or five, or twenty. So this mod enforces that I have to use Anki to continue playing, and allows me to use my gaming time to also work through some flashcards.

This isn’t for turning my Anki study sessions into gaming sessions. It’s for getting a few more flashcards done during my gaming sessions.

If you don’t use Anki, this mod is probably completely irrelevant for you. (And if you want to learn more about Anki, Nicky Case wrote a good introduction to spaced repetition flashcard systems here: https://ncase.me/remember/ )

How it works

The mod interfaces with the Anki add-on AnkiConnect, found here: https://github.com/FooSoft/anki-connect or here: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2055492159 (thanks, FooSoft!) Every time you enter a floor4, the mod gets from AnkiConnect a baseline number of how many reviews you’ve done that day, and pops up a card that prevents you from continuing with the game. Leave the game running while you do your reviews. Click on the card again, and it’ll query AnkiConnect again. Once AnkiConnect says that today you’ve done 10 more than the baseline, click on the card, the card will go away, and you’ll be able to continue slaying the spire.

Caveats

It works on my machine, which is a Windows computer running Anki 2.1.62 (I’ve been using it with this mod since 2.1.49), , with AnkiConnect on all the default settings (you can set a different URL for AnkiConnect, but it hasn’t been as thoroughly tested), only one other add-on (localize media), and Slay the Spire set to English (I assume other languages will work, but this mod’s text won’t be localized). I assume it works on Mac, but I’m not about to buy a Mac to test that. If you run into issues that I don’t run into, or if the setup instructions aren’t clear enough drop me a message on Steam or file a bug report on GitHub and I’ll do my best to fix it.

Computers Only, so if you only play Slay the Spire on mobile/Nintendo/whatever, this mod not going to work for you.

Mods Disable Achievements, but there’s another mod floating around that will re-enable them for you if you want.

The original Reddit post, where I first announced this mod

The github repository, where the code for this mod lives

The mod on the Steam workshop, again

  1. it doesn’t pause the in-game timer because that was too much work, but if there’s demand for that I can see what I can do ↩︎

  2. this is configurable now, you can add more floors between enforced reviews, or set it to a random number ↩︎

  3. this is configurable from 0-100, start screen -> Mods -> Anki Study Break -> Config. 10 is about the right number for me. If there’s demand for it, I can increase the upper bound, but if you’re doing 100+ cards in between floors, you probably don’t need this mod anyway. ↩︎

  4. this also has the side effect of making me do more reviews every time I save-scum which, I mean, I feel like I shouldn’t complain about that ↩︎