Stacklands is a charming and deceptively difficult game by the Sokpop Collective. A solitaire card game city builder roguelike, you would think that a game with so many different elements would be impossible to enjoy without a significant time investment, but Sokpop has crafted an intuitive enough experience that you can immediately pick up.
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However, despite its accessible nature, there’s a lot of depth to the game, to the point that some things can even come off as obtuse. While discovery is part of the game’s appeal, some basic things aren’t emphasized or even mentioned. Here are some of the things we wish we knew before we started Stacklands.
7 You Can Sell The Idea Cards
Idea Cards are the main source of crafting recipes in Stacklands, giving you some much-needed direction and opening up your options in the game. They all cost one gold, but can clog up your board as you accumulate them.
That’s because you’re probably supposed to sell them. They don’t actually do anything once you have them, other than create clutter, and the recipe is unlocked in your Ideas tab after you get it. In fact, you don’t even need the idea cards to memorize new recipes, since any combinations that you manage to suss out on your own are also saved in your Ideas tab.
6 There’s A Lot Of RNG
A major mechanic in the game is modeled after TCG booster packs, so Stacklands is relatively up front about how much randomness figures into gameplay, and even then, at least the name of each booster pack gives you an idea of what it contains.
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That being said, beyond the card packs, there are a lot of variables in play: when the strange portals spawn (which drop in monsters for you to deal with), getting a second villager, what resources you get from cards, and whether your villagers' attacks land, just to name a few.
5 Build The Coin Chest
You might notice that as you acquire coins, they tend to clutter up the little amount of space you have to work with. Well, if you stack a coin and two wood, then you can have yourself an economical space-saving solution: the coin chest.
It may be tempting to just save the coin, but in an already card-heavy game, having some open space is a sanity saver, especially since the different cards - not all of which can stack together - can really add up. Besides, there's nothing quite as satisfying as a clean, well-organized board.
4 Card Expansions = Board Expansion
The shed, and later on the warehouse, serve a valuable purpose in the game, namely increasing your card cap and allowing you to hold onto more cards without selling them at the end of a Moon.
They also have another important purpose that may not be readily apparent until you have a few of them down, which is that they also increase your board size as you build them. The effect is subtle, but very obvious when you start a new game after you had a few sheds and warehouses in your last run and now have to contend with a tiny board again.
3 Berry + Apple = Early Game Food Storage
Starvation is always a looming threat in Stacklands, so it would be beneficial to keep a surplus of food for your villagers. However, having too many berries and apples lying around will not only make your board messier, but you may even have to end up selling your surplus when you hit the card cap.
Fortunately, you can combine an apple and a berry to make fruit salad, which not only gives you the same amount of food, effectively halving the space the items would have taken separately, but it also sells for more than each of those items separately, meaning when you have a comfortable surplus, you can sell them at a much higher profit!
2 Pause Liberally
One of your biggest opponents and most important resources in Stacklands is time. You pay in food at the end of every Moon or lose villagers (or the game, if you only have one), you run the risk of coming up against a monster-summoning Strange Portal at the end of a Moon, and the monsters summoned get tougher and more numerous whenever this happens.
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Luckily, you can pause the game freely, which means you have all the time you need to move cards and make decisions, something you should fully take advantage of, as even running the game at normal speed while you move cards and such can cost you. Of course, as you get better at the game, you can also speed time up for when you’re genuinely out of actions to take.
1 There’s A Win Condition
Though the game seems like one of those experiences where the point is how long you can last before the weight of entropy crushes you under its inexorable boot, a quick glance at the achievement list - the completion of which can constitute its own win condition - will reveal that there is in fact a final boss to face.
Without spoiling too much, you summon this boss by putting an object in a certain structure. While this might seem obtuse, the game doesn’t even tell you this much. So, experiment with card combinations and build yourself a village mighty enough to take on this mighty final foe! Even after you win, nothing's stopping you from going again, though...
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