Stacklands is a village-management game with an extremely minimal aesthetic – it’s all cards. Your villagers are cards, buildings are cards, resources are cards, marauding monsters are cards, a pile of rabbit droppings is a card…

You interact with cards, or rather make them interact with each other, by stacking them (hence the name, probably). Stacking a stick and a flint, for instance, will start a timer that consumes them and spits out a campfire; stacking two eggs on the campfire will start a timer that makes an omelet. Sometimes you have to stack a worker as well, sometimes (as in both those examples) you don’t.

What combat there is works the same way – if a goblin is slowly wandering around the place and nudging aside your nice neat piles, stack one or more of your workers onto it to start a fight at a time of your choosing. (Otherwise, the goblin will eventually bump into one of your workers and start a fight then, and if you haven’t stacked any weapons or armor in that worker’s inventory…)

And then there’s the booster pack mechanic. Whereas in something like Minecraft you’d be wandering around the world looking for resources, in Stacklands you’ll put coins toward booster packs until you pull the things you need.

I put 35 hours into Stacklands, back in the mists of yore, but I never “beat” it – I didn’t visit the island, collect all the available cards, beat the final boss, or create a semi-automatic card complex that I could sit back and admire. I just got bored in the mid-game and dropped it.

I recently installed it again and sunk another four hours or so into it, and got bored with it a lot faster.

Part of that might be my fault. Stacklands has no soundtrack and very little sound at all, aside from a low blip or boop of feedback when a timer finishes. I could have ensured I had a couple of podcast episodes downloaded and ready to play in the backgorund… but the podcast I’m thinking of semi-regularly inspires me to take notes, so I’d be splitting my attention three ways in a game that punishes me for inefficiency if I don’t pay close attention to its timers. So I don’t know how well that would have worked out.

Or maybe it had something to do with the bugs, like the one where I couldn’t pull cards off of a stack and had to close the game and restart… every half-hour to an hour. Or the one where a smelter just refused to let itself be built, despite my unstacking and restacking its cards a few different ways… I don’t remember that problem from last time, and I gave up before figuring it out.

Or maybe it’s just because, four hours in, I wasn’t seeing anything new and wasn’t getting any pleasure out of replaying the old stuff.

But overall, I was underwhelmed, and I think I’m about to uninstall it again.

I’d still cautiously recommend it, though. It did fill up 35 hours of my time the first time around, and it’s $8 when it isn’t (frequently) on sale, so if you have a spare few bucks and are into management games and card-crafting, you might want to give it a try.