Stacklands – User Articles | GamersGlobal.de

After I at PC gamer an article about Stacklands read, the title, which was priced at (almost) four euros, quickly went into my Steam library. Stacklands is also available from that Indie game portal itch.io for 3.99 euros. The building game with mini roguelite elements was developed by the Dutch Sokpop Collective. The team of four developers has set itself the task of releasing at least one game per month that can be played through until the next title is released. You also get the games in one Patreon subscription modelwhich costs you three dollars a month in the cheapest tier.

Listed the Sokpop Collective playlist there are currently a whopping 94 entries on Steam. However, I am not aware of any titles among the top sellers: you will find them in the top five alongside Stacklands Simmiland, Ollie & Bollie – Outdoor Estate, Soko Loco Deluxe and luckitown. All games with a positive assessment – but with an overall and comparatively manageable number of ratings. Stacklands stands out with currently over 2,000 reviews and an extremely positive rating.

At the beginning of the game you see a lot of green that needs to be filled. At first, only a settler can actually tackle it.

Stacklands is a card-based building game with the goal of creating a prosperous settlement. At the beginning, there is only a green playground in front of you with a lonely deck of cards waiting to be opened. By clicking on the pack several times, the first playing cards pop out. There is always a villager in the starter pack, the other cards are sources of raw materials such as rock, trees, berry bushes or resources such as wood, stone and food.

Your resident processes a resource source by linking it to the corresponding card. The basic sources provide you with a maximum of three raw materials. You then process these by linking them to other cards to create objects, higher-value materials, food and buildings. This opens up new building options for your settlement.

Stacklands does without a framework story. However, there is currently an overarching game goal that can be repeated. However, I don’t know whether there is a “real” ending or whether the playing field can no longer be expanded after a certain point in time.

You get the important card packs by buying them with gold. The most reliable source of getting hold of the means of payment is through the sale of your tickets. Especially at the beginning of the game it is also essential to separate yourself from them. Because number one on the to-do list is providing your residents with food: If they don’t have enough to eat at the end of a round – called the moon phase in the game – they starve. And from now on remind you of the omission in the form of a corpse card. At least until you bury them with dignity in a cemetery.

After several playthroughs you will have unlocked a total of seven thematic card stacks, which of course leads to a higher card variety. The starter package “Humble Beginnings” only costs you three, the most expensive variant “Order and Structure” a whopping 25 gold pieces. The cards contained in the respective theme packs are fixed. However, which ones end up exactly on your field is decided by chance.

My dwellers are involved in a serious skirmish against four monstrosities. Incidentally, the fight runs automatically as soon as you assign a resident to an attacker.

I failed early on in the first attempts and I believe that there is no way around it. Because initially you only have the basic card pack available, only gradually do you unlock the remaining decks and thus get to know the different mechanisms and link variants. So a little resistance to frustration doesn’t hurt. However, the games in Stacklands are pretty quick and you can unlock all of the content pretty quickly. Or to put it more clearly: Stacklands is not a roguelite that you will cut your teeth on!

However, your village will be regularly attacked by dangerous monsters during a game. These spawn through portals that appear in your village after predetermined phases of the moon. If a dweller’s life points are reduced to zero in the fight against the attacking giant rats, goblins and skeletons, they will irrevocably lose their life. The game ends immediately when all of your residents are dead.

In order for your villagers to defend themselves against the attackers, you arm them with spears or swords. In addition to the supply of sufficient food, building a powerful militia is just as important so that your settlement has a chance of surviving. There are other random attacks on your home, for example when exploring catacombs or the mine. In my games, however, only the monster portals were existentially threatening, from which enemy alliances tumbled out as the game progressed.

If you don’t feel like fighting and war dead and just want to build up a hamlet, a peaceful mode is available for you. Although your residents will starve to death without food in this variant as well, building up a food chain can be accomplished without any problems. I managed my first successful run on the easy level of difficulty. This grants you longer moon phases, which means in concrete terms that you produce more goods in each round and expand your settlement much faster.

This attempt was going really well until three monsters showed me the limits of my defenses.

Wow! Stacklands has kept me really entertained over the past seven hours of gameplay. In terms of content, it is by no means super complex: the production chains remain clear with three levels (example: three wood become a beam, you need different numbers of them for the construction of some buildings), the gameplay is uniform and the individual actions quickly become Routine. In addition, Stacklands is very simple in its visual presentation, to say the least. The title also does without a varied background music and brute sound effects. After a few hours I have seen and experienced everything and long since exchanged the elevator music for a nice music album.

Despite that, I really enjoy Stacklands with its straightforward gameplay and catchy mechanics. I don’t dig through submenus, study development statistics and lose myself in the needs pyramid of my residents. However, Stacklands is not a sure-fire success, it requires forward-looking goods management and the gaming table constantly demands sorting and order.

That’s why I want more Stacklands! More maps, more events, more goods and more buildings! And the developers follow this call. In a post on different platforms (and here on Steam) they announced that they are working on more content for Stacklands. These should appear in May and June 2022 and expand the game by 50 to 100 new cards. Although they don’t reveal anything specific about the content: I’m looking forward to it!

Constructing storage buildings increases the pool of cards you are allowed to keep at the end of a moon phase and the size of the playing field. More space is also needed in this game on the easy level of difficulty, my village is awash with wealth.