Stacklands - Ishvii Reviews

Stacklands is a rather unique take on village building and really has to be played to be understood. You place cards to build a village, and the cards you place on top of each other have different results. For example, placing a villager on a berry bush produces berries. Wood can be combined into plants to make a garden, which will create more carrots from carrots. Over time, your village expands and you learn recipes for places to explore, new buildings, new recipes, new foods, automation and all kinds of things. New villager types like explorers and swordsmen and even now, an entirely new area on an island (for free) with the ability to transfer cards between each.

Additional

What started as a "churn out one new game every week and see what sticks" has really created a unique and enjoyable concept. The polish is very high, and it's scope is focused enough to produce a very enjoyable game that will last you 6-10 hours for 4 quid.

Pros

Unique gameplay
You can build things by combining cards
Once you've seen an idea, it goes in your sidebar - you don't have to keep the card
You can pause to think and move cards around
There's a keybinding for "move cards into a grid" which makes it a bit neater
When people die, they create corpses, which makes a graveyard, which can create soil, which is valuable for growing more food to stop people dying. However, unused corpses do nothing, and stuff up your card limit
You can build buildings to increase your card limit. When you do this, your play area expands and it zooms out a little
You can sell excess cards to buy booster packs, which provide new cards and ideas
Animal cards like the rabbit and cow move around on their own... which is cute at first, but gets annoying pretty quickly. Howver, there is an animal pen to keep them in one place (but it takes a while to discover)
There are enemies that will fight your villagers
You can train your villagers into other more specialised roles
Quests tell you what to try and do next, and unlock new booster packs
Nice sound effects and chill background music
If you put related production cards next to each other, they stack automatically. For example, a quarry will pop out stone and auto stack onto a stone pile. If that stone pile is next to a brickworks, it'll automatically start turning it into bricks
Some cards are "foil" which means they're worth more
There is combat. Your villagers have attack stats, and multiple humans and enemies can join the battle

Cons

Cards are often popping out of other cards, which get stuck on other cards and shuffle everything out of the way
It's clear that some cards don't count towards the limit, like coins and poop - but I can't tell what else
I regularly got a bug where a card pile would bug out, so I could add more cards to the stack, but I could never remove them from the stack until I restarted the game
It took me several hours to realise that one food card with a value higher than the required food for one villager will actually feed multiple villagers. I assumed it was getting wasted, but it looks like the same item goes around multiple times

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