Game Design Perspective: Stacklands

In this iteration of Game Design Perspectives, we'll be taking a look at Sokpop's latest gem, Stacklands. For those unfamiliar with Sokpop, they are a Nordic game collective known for short and experimental games. There are four developers who work independently (with some asset sharing), and each dev releases a small game every four months. The releases are staggered so that there's a new game released monthly. Their output can range from the playful (here's an FPS bird simulator, go do bird things) to the abstract (here's a mini game engine, go make a game). One of their latest games, Stacklands, is worth a closer look.

Stacklands is a card-based village management survival game. It takes its name from its chief mechanic, the stacking of cards into piles. Stack a villager on top of a berry bush and you'll start to produce berries. Stack a villager on top of three wood and a stone and you'll get a lumberyard. At the end of every turn (which lasts for 2 minutes of real time), each villager must eat food or starve.

There's a number of video game influences on Stacklands. You can see echoes of survival games' crafting, although the crafting system here works well in a simplified version. You can see clear traces of Cultist Simulator, with both its ludic fiction of picking up or putting down cards like physical objects and RTS-esque building up of resource pipelines. Beyond that, there are two non-video-game influences that are worth examining.

The first influence is the most obvious one: collectible card games. The first action you take in the game is to open a "booster pack" - a small, random set of cards. Anyone who's played Magic: The Gathering or other CCG knows the fun of opening up a new pack and seeing what you get. Stacklands has a number of different booster packs with each one covering a different theme, like "Humble Beginnings" or "Logic and Reason". Each themed pack contains different kinds of cards, and part of the game is learning which packs contain what cards. It's a good mechanic to allow the player to decide how they'd like to expand their village (perhaps by choosing the "Exploration" theme pack) while still randomizing the result. It's a great game design strategy - allow the player to direct themselves to a build, but make them deal with varied situations on the way. Or, as a counterfactual, you could imagine a version of Stacklands where you buy all your cards at some card shop. The game would play very differently if you were able to select exactly the card you were looking for. I don't think this imaginary mechanic improves the experience.

The second influence is a more subtle import from the board game world: the action space. The board game Agricola provides a great example of action spaces. In Agricola, two to five players take turns placing a 'meeple' figure on an action space. When a meeple is placed, the player gets to perform some action - gathering resources, building fences, planting crops, baking break, and so on. The key insight here is that, due to meeples and action spaces, the key currency in Agricola isn't in food or wood or stone. The most fundamental currency is in actions, or the placement of meeples. (Agricola has a wonderful card called the Mendicant that subtly allows you to trade future actions for extra present actions, but you can do this _before_ you play the card. It's a really interesting bit of game design. ctrl-f for "mendicant" on that looong page.)

Stacklands doesn't have action spaces per se, but it does have villagers (who resemble the classic meeple shape!) It also has the card-stacking mechanic discussed earlier. With a few exceptions, all of these card stacking examples require a villager. That makes these stacks of cards, minus the villager, equivalent to action spaces.

Managing your actions is the key to success in Stacklands. An interesting design choice made by Sokpop is that you are able to create new villagers more or less as often as you would like. Once you have two villagers and build a house action space, the two villagers can make a baby, and that baby soon grows into another villager / action. There’s no limit of “You need 5 Large Houses in order to grow your village”. A single house can get you through the whole game.

This ability to gain new actions at will is counterbalanced by the hunger system. At the end of every turn (each lasting two minutes), all your villagers require two food, plus another food per baby. If you expand your village before you have a proper food engine running, some of your villagers will die, perhaps enough so that you can’t fend off the next goblin invasion. I would characterize the main challenge of Stacklands as making sure that your village growth isn’t so fast that it outruns your food engine, but not so slow that those invasions wreck shop on your village.

Stacklands has some great ideas in it, but it's not a perfect game. The engine-building feels like it could have benefited from another layer or two of progression. Once I reached the last level of production (planks and bricks), it didn't feel like there was anything left in the game to challenge me. I also would have liked to see the exploration part expanded. Instead of simply placing a villager on the Forest card or the Catacombs card, what if that loaded up a new "board" playspace adjacent to my village? There could be new challenges and cards to discover. OK, I'll admit, those two objections boil down to "I wish the game were longer", which is hardly a fair critique. Here's a more substantial one: as your resource engine improves, you are less and less reliant on the booster packs for getting resources. By the time I hit the midgame, I ran out of reasons to buy new booster packs and I wasn't engaging with that mechanic. It feels like a missed opportunity, especially when that mechanic is so critical to the feel of the early game.

Stacklands was meant to be a 3 - 5 hour gameplay experience, and it does an excellent job of that. I'm hopeful that Sokpop will expand on this game in the future, and we can see what other interesting ideas shake out of the format.