Stacklands is a village builder by indie game collective Sokpop where you stack cards to collect food, build structures, and fight creatures. The game has recently come to the Nintendo Switch and I gave it a play to share my thoughts.
A copy of this game was provided for the purposes of this review.
As the name alludes to, Stacklands has you drawing cards to create your homestead and stacking them to further evolve your village. While you start off with the bare essentials, you will be able to unlock more card pack options to better diversify your cards as well as get recipes, called “ideas”, that use specific combinations of resources to create new resources or tools.
As your building your village, be aware of the dangers ahead. Firstly, make sure your villagers are fed. One instance of not enough food can end your run. However you have more control of this as you can quickly learn actual food recipes that will improve food options, plus earning the ability to cook your food helps as well. Other dangers are less predictable however as you can uncover enemies as you open new packs and explore new lands. You can reach a point where you can train a militia to protect your village, but you are likely to find at least lowly enemies before you reach that point. There is a passive mode you can do if that suits you better though.
I have recently discovered my enjoyment of these card-stacking builder games so I have actually had my eye on Stacklands for a while. The basics are simple to grasp but strategy is an important piece when building. Theme wise, Stacklands is not the most interesting or unique, but there are fun elements such as magic as you progress. This is a solid entry in strategic builder games, and I could easily spend hours and hours playing.
I will say that I do think I would have enjoyed this game a lot more if I was playing it on PC instead of on the Switch. Maneuvering cards around felt a little tedious and I found the button mapping to not be entirely intuitive for me, which led to me hitting the wrong buttons and thus performing actions that could ruin my run. My very first run ended this way when my sole villager died because I accidentally sold my berry bush instead of just wanting to grab and move it.
Overall, I enjoy Stacklands but, for me, the PC version is the ideal way to play it. But if you are unable to play on PC but can do so on the Switch, it is nice to have that option to play this simple yet strategic village builder.
You can play Stacklands on the Nintendo Switch now, as well as on Steam.