Despite its originality, Stacklands does not satisfy as much I hoped it would. The gameplay somewhere in the middle of the game (after you’ve set up a viable food source, but before traveling from the main land) is probably the most enjoyable; you get ways to automate your supplies, grow your military, and set up your board of cards in a clean and manageable way. However, before and after the midway point, you’re basically just managing the cards that get thrown around due to limited space and enemies/animals.

One of my biggest gripes with the game is the fact that every card looks pretty much the same except for 6 colours and hard to discern card art. Many more colours could have been introduced to clarify card types, and the font and art could have definitely been made clearer as well. Thankfully, you’re able to zoom in and out while pausing the game’s cycle to look at the cards more closely at your own pace.

If you’re into sorting cards and collecting a boatload of them in an encyclopedia of sorts, you will definitely enjoy this game. If you’re going in with the expectation of a fun Roguelike experience like I did, you will be disappointed. I finished the game 100% in meagre 2 runs, and did not feel like going to any of the cursed lands of the DLC either because they do not add any value.

A short simple game about stacking cards to generate cards to sell to buy more cards. If you like skinner-boxy reward loops this game is a nice short diversion, and I enjoyed the initial phase of experimenting, exploring and expanding. I find these games without distinct phases bring out a compulsive tendency in me where I'll just play on and on getting more and more tired, pushing towards an end that isn't coming. I think I'd have enjoyed Stacklands a lot more if there were clearer points to stop a session and come back later.

The game dragged toward the end, especially when I got onto the island content. Apparently the island is an update, sort of Free-LC, and I think it might be more fun for returning players. Without a break it just felt like an additional chunk of time wasting before reaching a similar climax. By that point everything had become incredibly messy, the screen flooded with cards that bounced about and disorganised themselves, pipelines of farm > stove > messhall that nevertheless required manual input at every step, and a large, unsearchable menu of recipes. Some QoL upgrades could go a long way.

If you don't spend too long stuck at the end it's a nice short game, but the last couple of hours soured me on the experience.

Stacklands é uma mistura curiosa de jogo de cartas com um rts, ou um jogo de gerenciamento. Eu me sinto no começo de um age of empires, mandando meus coletores buscarem recursos como madeira e comida, mas é tudo feito brincando com as combinações de cartas de baralho que você recebe.

A graça do jogo é experimentar essas combinações e descobrir coisas novas, assim liberando mais cartas e desbloqueando novas situações. E é muito interessante e gostoso fazer isso. Ao mesmo tempo também é o que me faz ficar frustrada com ele. Num geral eu acho que me dou melhor com jogos com objetivos claros, eu não sou muito boa na parada de ir experimentando e descobrindo por conta própria e é por isso que nunca fui muito longe nele.

Eu comprei esse jogo num dia que eu estava muito mal, e ele me ajudou a fugir da minha cabeça por algumas horas e só por isso já valeu.

Não sei se um dia vou "terminar" ele, mas tem sido gostoso abrir de vez em quando e jogar uma partida. Não virou um vício, não sei quanto tempo vou levar pra enjoar, mas por enquanto tem sido um bom jogo para jogar de vez em quando.

Também custa baratinho demais (menos de 11 reais no preço cheio) e está sempre sendo atualizado. Vale a pena conferir nem que seja pela curiosidade de ver como eles conseguiram misturar dois gêneros tão diferentes.

copy/paste of my steam review lol:
this is probably the best card management sim i have played. the art is so cute, i always enjoyed getting a new card just to see the illustration. i also really enjoyed the soundtrack, which i found impressive simply because lofi typically drives me to madness. the moon cycle moves at just the right speed that it kept me on my toes between making sure all my villagers lived and whatever self-imposed goal that i gave myself, but it wasn't stressful in the way that i find cultist simulator is. my one regret is that i should have bought this off of itch.io instead of steam. they're about the same cost in USD, but itch takes less in royalties and you can chose to pay the devs more as well (which they deserve!)

A game that combines two different game genres in a good way.

The game is a card-based colony simulation. You manipulate humans to upgrade your town(?). I can say that I enjoyed both the idea and the gameplay, but there is a problem. Nothing new is coming to the game after some ingame day. You're basically doing the same things over and over again and it gets incredibly boring after a point.

I'm not going to give you a bad or good recommendation to play, it might be better to make your own decision here.

dis game is really fun, you have da cards and you do things with da cards
it's really simple and works really well but i have dis issue where there's a lot of grinding and waiting to get da resources you need
it takes a bit of careful and smart planning but you won't figure everything out on your first run, but at da same time it can feel kinda grueling to start all over again and building it all from scratch if you ran into some problem or made a mistake halfway through a run
but it's a really fun game and i love how simple and cute it is <3

Stacklands is a twist on management games: every object in the game, from people to buildings to resources to money, is represented by a card on the game board. These cards interact through being stacked on top of one another, causing an item to be equipped, a building to be built from the required materials, or a production cycle to be initiated. By producing excess goods and selling them, the player can buy booster packs, which unlock new cards and new recipes for buildings and items. Over time, new areas are unlocked, as well as powerful foes to do battle against.

The game takes place over turns called moons, which last for a few real time minutes. At the end of each moon, all your villagers have to be fed -- if there's not enough food cards, unfed villagers will starve and die. Aside from that, random events may occur between moons, some of which force your people into battle, and that may also result in their demise. Either way, should you run out of people cards at any moment, the game ends. It's easy to understand in theory, but Stacklands teaches little and forces the player to learn everything from experience, making the early game rocky. And that is but the first of its problems.

What could have been an outstanding game is merely fine, thanks to some questionable design choices and a rough execution. In Stacklands. annoyance is part of the game's mechanics: cards collide with one another and push each other off to the sides, messing up the board and adding some annoying glitches to the mix. Some cards allow for making compact stacks of the same type of card, or guiding your villagers towards certain foods, but those take time and resources to make and only solve part of the problems. Fundamentally, though, the floatiness of the game's objects eliminates their physicality as cards, downgrading Stacklands from an interesting card game to a more generic management one.

There's also a severe lack of quality of life options. If playing on the Steam Deck, you'll immediately feel it in your hands: the controller support is awful, if not on its own, because of glitches stemming from a misuse of Unity's (admittedly terrible) UI navigation system. That the game should not have the Steam Deck Verified seal is a given, but even playing with a mouse, the UI could have been so much more helpful, like by allowing for certain shortcuts, warning about finished tasks, or the presence and position of enemies and the like. It could also provide more guidance, not just in the beginning of the game, but also, when you're about to do something that would, I don't know, summon an incredibly powerful boss that might end your run or something.

On that note, Stacklands should not have had permadeath. Yes, I know card-based roguelikes are all the rage nowadays, but that doesn't mean just any card-adjacent game should have permadeath in it: a full run of Stacklands with the current updates takes upwards of ten hours. Imagine dying to the final boss and having to redo everything -- I almost feel bad for saying Dead Cells had it bad with its deaths. A save option, even if it was a consumable item you had to create with rare materials, would have been welcome.

Nette Idee, schön umgesetzt.
Ein paar quality of life-Ideen hätten das Spiel sicher spaßiger gemacht. Hütten produzieren mehr maximale Karten auf dem Feld. Diese müssen jedoch ebenfalls im Feld rumliegen anstatt auf einem Stapel außerhalb platziert zu werden.
Wenn Tiere gegen den Stapel Hütten kommen, rutschen diese übers ganze Feld.
Münzen fliegen überall rum.
Das hätte alles etwas schöner umgesetzt werden können.
Dennoch eine Empfehlung.

i dunno. it's definitely not bad, but there's a lot of missed potential here.

a little too easy/forgiving to play as a roguelite, too simple to play like dwarf fortress, too flat to play like simcity.

the presentation is often wonderful and the systems often work pretty well, but stacklands could benefit heavily from some more focus in its gameplay. in its current state, the player does not have much interactivity or choice-- the game can often feel like a list of chores without the charm, wonder, or environment of a game like animal crossing. it is not fun or interesting to thoughtlessly drag virtual cards on top of each other; even windows solitaire demands more of a player's attention than this.

one more gripe, then I'm done, i promise. there is not enough consistency in stackland's mechanics for the kind of game it strives to be. most notably, it can be infuriating when stacks sometimes function as queues (leaving a villager atop a stack of berry bushes will harvest each of them) while some times they don't (leaving a villager atop a stack of wood does nothing.)

on the whole, i enjoyed the time i spent with stacklands, but it was likely more for the movie i was watching in the background than the game i was playing.

Donde Heliopedia se afana en simularte un juego mucho más grande del que realmente acaba siendo, Stacklands sí que llega a ser un juego denso y complicado al poco de empezar. Aunque tal vez eso se deba a que la base empleada aquí (amontonar cartas en variaciones cada vez más distintas) da muchas más oportunidades que lo que unos muñecos paseándose por planetas jamás sería capaz. En cualquier caso, Stacklands funciona mejor como un Solitario avanzado en el que compites contra el tiempo en una carrera de aguante. Algo que, en los videojuegos, existe desde los tiempos de Hammurabi. Pero una cosa que he ido dándome cuenta de los juegos de Sokpop es que, en lugar de aprovechar este molde para introducir chistes propios u ocurrencias a costa de las mezclas, presentan la idea de una forma bastante llana y directa. Esto hace al juego sentirse más accesible, pero tal vez con menos personalidad que uno que se atreviese a retarte a mezclar una carta improbable con otra.

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Where Heliopedia strives to look like a game that's bigger than it actually is, Stacklands becomes a dense and complex pretty soon after the beginning. Though perhaps that's because the basis employed here (stacking cards in increasingly different permutations) opens far more options than the physics offered by the tridimensional dolls. In any case, Stacklands works best as a tenser Solitaire in which your main goal is enduring as much as possible against the odds. Which is the kind of gameplay that has existed in videogames since Hammurabi. But one thing I've been noticing about Sokpop's titles is that, rather than taking advantage of this to make some jokes or introduce personal flourishes, they always streamline themselves to present the idea as plainly as possible. This probably makes their games feel more accessible, but perhaps at the expense of greater personalities.

What starts with a "look, a cute resource management game with cards" ends with hours of entertainment in a game that, behind a simple interface and game loop, hides an addictive loop that shines specially in the first few hours of a run.

It's fast-paced, and you can feel the pressure at the beginning to get enough resources to survive another day. And another day, and another, and... And you have spent hours playing without noticing.

The most notable aspect is how it has implemented the process of discovering new recipes. Maybe one of your villagers find an idea while exploring the mountains. Or maybe you have decided to try what happens if you stack a berry and an apple together.

The late game may feel a bit more repetitive, but it's a game definitely worth trying, and ideal for playing in a portable device.