Stacklands

Five dollars really isn’t a lot to spend on a video game. In fact, at most coffee shops, an espresso drink will cost more than that. Heck, if I think about how much money I spent on comic books over the past few months, five dollars barely even registers.

So when I saw that Stacklands only cost $5 on Steam, it seemed like it was probably worth taking a gamble on. In fact, if you bundle Stacklands with Simmiland, another game by Sokpop Collective, you can get two games for about $7.50. (It’s important to note that Stacklands has some major content updates planned, and those might come with a price increase in the future.)

And hoo boy, did I ever get hooked on this thing.

Stacklands - Strange Portal

This is basically a village-building-slash-survival game that’s played entirely with cards. If you want to craft something, you’ll stack Wood cards and Stone cards in various configurations. If you want to harvest berries, you’ll stack a Villager card on top of a Berry Bush card. If you want to make more villagers, you’ll stack two Villager cards on top of a House card. And so on.

When you get items you don’t need, you can sell them back to the game board for coins. Then, you can use coins to buy booster packs that give you more cards.

If you want to really milk the early game, you can buy the cheapest booster pack, which costs three coins and gives you three cards. You can then think about ways to use the cards you get to make back more than you spent. One Berry Bush card, for instance, produces three Berry cards, each of which can be sold for a coin. Even better, a Tree card might produce two Wood cards. Each of those can be turned into a Stick card, and each Stick card can be sold for two coins. That means a Tree card could end up being worth four coins, which is more than enough to buy another booster pack.

As the game progresses, you’ll start to find portals that spawn monsters into your world. In the beginning, this isn’t super difficult, but eventually, those portals will be spawning hoards of beasts, and you’ll need to have a veritable army of card people to take them all down.

Even though the premise is simple, the animations and sound effects are satisfying enough to lull you into a groove. Remember how fun it was to hear the card-shuffling sound in Solitaire for Windows? It’s like that — the card sounds are really fun to listen to, which makes moving them around feel really good. And when you start figuring out crafting combos and you find yourself progressing deep into the game’s cycle? Well, you’ve really got a stew going.

Stacklands

No joke, I thought I would spend maybe an hour or two on this, but my play time at the time of this writing is more than 11 hours according to Steam. That’s less than 50 cents an hour, and I still would like to go back and monkey around with the game some more — especially when future updates start to broaden the experience.

If you want to know more about Stacklands, you can check out the super-informative trailer below, or go check out my detailed guides on the game.

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