Saturday Morning Gaming: Stacklands

Back in 2018, I played Cultist Simulator a *LOT*. It was my favorite game that year. The gameplay was like nothing I’d ever played before. Like, card stacking/resource management. And reading… there was a *LOT* of reading.

Well, the theme to Cultist Simulator was intense. I could see how someone might find it off-putting. And since doing well at the game meant really reading and investigating what the cards were describing, I could see someone not wanting to play even if they found the mechanics to be really interesting.

Well, good news. Stacklands is Cultist Simulator but it’s nice.

You’re no longer trying to learn the dark secrets of the occult but you’re just trying to run a civilization, man. Start off with a starter pack of cards:

Open them (the first pack is always the same) and you get a villager, a berry bush, a rock, some wood, and a coin. And now you have to make a civilization. Your guy will need to eat two units of food every turn and so the first thing you want to do is harvest the berries from the bush.

Put your dude on the bush and watch the timer go down.

The timer goes down all the way and the bush spits out a berry.

A berry provides one unit of food. A berry bush will drop 3 berries before being depleted.

So you’ll need to place your villager on the rock or the wood and then sell those and buy a new booster pack with random contents.

And then you start exploring recipes. You add two sticks to a stone? You get a slingshot! Put the slingshot on your dude, and then you get a militia member!

Buy more packs, make more stuff, discover more recipes.

You know what you get when you put two people in a house? That’s right! You get a baby!

Oh, and the baby will need to eat too. Make more stuff, find new recipes, fight animals, eventually fight monsters, create a civilization from scratch.

It’s a really neat mechanic so if you wanted to like Cultist Simulator but were turned off by the weirdness, you should give this one a shot.

So… what are you playing?

(Featured image is a screenshot of the title screen. All screenshots taken by the author.)