Stacklands Getting Its First DLC - Cursed Worlds!

Stacklands is a pretty interesting take on a village-survival genre. Don't let its simplistic look fool you, it is actually a well designed and fun game that goes rather deep in its gameplay.

I have discovered the game last week and had tons of fun with it. And as luck would have it, it is getting its first DLC - Cursed Worlds - tomorrow on July 25th!

Quote From Sokpop Collective

Our first DLC is releasing Tuesday July 25th! In the Cursed Worlds DLC, travel to three different worlds where the villagers are haunted by tricky curses. Build up their village, then use new cards and card packs to lift the curse!

Here's a short overview of all the new features. Find out more on the store page here.

The price of the DLC will be $3.99/£3.39/€3.99. Make sure to wishlist it so you get notified on release!

• 🃏 130+ new cards, 50+ new Quests, 15 new card packs
• ⏰ 3-5 hours of playtime
• 🌌 Travel to 3 different Cursed Worlds
  
  • 👴 Take care of villagers as they get sick and grow older
  • 🤗 Keep villagers happy
  • 👑 Satisfy a royal's demands
• 🐈 Befriend cats
• ✏️ Name villagers
• 🍕 Cook new foods, including but not limited to pizza

But first, let me tell you a bit about the game to bring it to your attention so maybe you can try it out for yourselves.

What Is Stacklands?

A village-builder/survival game where you get your resources, materials, structures and villagers in form of cards from various card packs and by combining different cards together.

The core game loop is very simple, but solid.

You buy card packs, you get cards. Combine cards to build stuff or sell those cards to buy more packs to get more/different cards to build more/different stuff. Rinse and repeat.

There isn't a regular research as you might be used to from other titles in this genre, but the card packs can contain Ideas, among other things, which are basically blueprints for various stuff.

Great thing about this is that Ideas are a kind of resource in itself, once you learn them (by acquiring them) you can sell them off to cycle your Coins. You keep the knowledge in the Ideas tab. But you can also discover the card combinations by random or by trial and error stacking various (amounts of) cards together.

The Quests will generally guide you through the main story and "tech progression", but you are by no means bound by that.

In the base game there are three "worlds" - The Mainland, The Island and The Dark Forest. And they each have their own twist on the parts of the gameplay. I won't spoil more, so you can discover it for yourself.

Stacking Your Cards

This is the core gameplay mechanic, the way you get anything done and the way your village survives and progresses further. And it is FUN!

You literally start with sticks and stones and can get to a point where your production lines are semi-automatic and your food grows itself :)

You can either follow the Ideas that will tell you exactly what cards you need to combine to get a specific result, or you can experiment yourself and try different combinations to discover new cards before an Idea pops up to tell you how to do it. Sometimes this happens naturally when you stack enough of the same card, but most of the more complex items and structures will require multiple card combinations and some require a bit out-of-the-box thinking :)

By the way, there is poop in this game and it is USEFUL! Don't get your poop go to waste! :)

The Economy

To get cards, you need cards.

You need to sell cards in order to get Coins to buy new packs. Different cards will be worth various amounts of Coins and higher card combinations will generally be worth more. You can sell Stone or Wood for 1 Coin, but you can chop some Wood into Sticks that cost 2 Coins to make more profit and so on. There is a lot of ways to generate Coins, all you need to do is find what's working for you.

Staying Alive

The most important thing you need to do for your villagers to stay alive is to feed them. Makes sense, eh?:) If you are not able to feed them at the end of the Moon cycle, they die. But don't despair, everything in this game is a resource. Even corpses. So maybe dying isn't the worst thing that can happen :) Just don't let all of your villagers die.

Apart from starvation, villagers can die in combat. There are some passive and some aggressive mobs that can spawn either from card packs or periodically every few Moons and there is several boss fights during the game. They give different resources, some you can only get as drops from them, so they can be definitely worth it.

The Gameboard

Talking about enemies, the main reason why you generally want to get rid of them ASAP is because they don't stay in one place and knock your cards around, disrupting your neatly, or not so neatly, arranged storage and production areas. Which can be pretty annoying when that happens.

There are few things that can help you with this besides outright killing the enemies. There is a special card, that lets any card stack "stick" to the board so it can't be pushed around. Very helpful. But also relatively costly to produce. Or there are some Animal Pens if you want to become a rancher :)

There are also several buildings that not only increase your max card cap, but increase the size of the board.

Different Types of Villagers

Based on the equipment you give to your villagers they can become different professions, some are faster at building/combining things and some are faster at mining or chopping wood for example. But no matter what weapon or tool you give them, they can all fight. So you don't have to, but can, swap out "tools" for fighting weapons because tools are also weapons, just with different stats.

Speaking of stats, that is probably the only area where I was a bit disappointed with the game. Either I was doing something wrong or things changed during the development, but in some of the screenshots on the Steam page you can see that stats like hit-chance, attack speed and damage were displayed in the game at some point, but that isn't the case anymore.

Now you get to see health points, combat level - which I suppose is representing the overall combat prowess - and any effects given by gear (or abilities for enemies).

The individual gear pieces still list stats separately, so you can paint a picture of what kind of stats your villagers have when you add them up, and it is not difficult with only three gear slots, but it would be a nice quality of life feature, if the total sum was displayed. Especially since it was a thing at some point in the development.

The Game Is Fun!

I would totally recommend this game to anyone who likes village builder/survival games and is looking for something fresh. I 100%'ed the game in about 12 hours. Could probably be done faster, but I had fun all the way, so just go at your own pace. There is certainly a level of replayability once you know the card combinations and are able to get to certain things much faster.

This is not a new game, since it released in April 2022, so maybe you already heard of it or played it yourself, but since it is getting a new DLC you might want to go back for another adventure soon either way!

Mod Support Comming With Cursed Worlds

The Cursed Worlds update is supposed to also bring mod support and Steam Workshop support to the game which is just fantastic! Can't wait what modders bring to the table.

If you already played the game or once you do, feel free to share your experience or funny things that happened to you in the comments below!

Disclaimer: Some pictures in this article were sourced from Stacklands Wiki and/or the game's Steam page.