Stacklands review: stacks of fun

Stacklands / Sokpop Collective

Every now and then, a game comes along that completely takes over your life. It’s often the ones that seem innocent enough, a cutesy art style or a seemingly simple gameplay concept. You let your guard down, and then suddenly it’s 5 a.m., the sun is starting to peek over the hills, and you’ve spent the last 8 hours on the couch playing the same game. Stacklands is one of those games.

Stacklands was first released on PC back in 2022, but it’s now on the Nintendo Switch, which may just be the best possible platform for it. It’s a roguelike survival card game where you stack cards up to build a village, grow food, and make money.

Stacklands / Sokpop Collective

When you first start out, you have a single villager and a booster pack of resources. Inside that booster pack are a few simple resource cards — a rock, a log, a berry bush, a pile of dirt. You know, the basics. From there, you can drop your villager onto the rock to mine stone, for example, or onto the berry bush to get berries, which can then be planted in the dirt to grow another berry bush.

It’s a deceptively simple gameplay loop, but it escalates very quickly. Before long, you’ve got a self-sustaining stone farm, half a dozen chickens running around, more food than you know what to do with, and a crowded field filled with a hundred cards that you have to manage. That chaos is exciting, though, and the management aspect is deeply compelling.

Stacklands / Sokpop Collective

It’s fairly easy to keep your village going, even when you have a lot more villagers to feed, but if you want to do more than just survive, you have to start taking risks and making plays. You throw your village’s best fighters into the mysterious portal and hope you get something out of it. There are goals to complete too, often requiring you to figure out, somehow, how to smelt iron ore into iron bars to make stronger weapons. There are wikis out there, and idea cards randomly distributed through booster packs that tell you how to craft things, but figuring it out yourself is very satisfying, too.

And with the Switch, you can play it wherever you please. It’s a nice idea, and I certainly played a lot of it in a lot of places, but it’s definitely a game made for mouse and keyboard, and the controller implementation is a bit lacking. Navigating menus is very clunky and even after a few dozen hours with the game, I still frequently press the wrong buttons to open up the list of ideas. You can’t pin ideas and recipes for easy reference either, which is a strange limitation that seems like it could be easily fixed.

Stacklands / Sokpop Collective

Stacklands is an excellent little survival card game that’s quite unlike anything else on the market. It’s cute, deeply addictive, and has the potential to take away hours of your life, although its implementation on Switch leaves a lot of room for improvement. Still, if I can spend 40 hours stacking chickens on top of each other to make eggs, then it can’t really be that bad, can it?

Score: 9/10

Version tested: Nintendo Switch