The team of absolute game machines over at Sokpop Collective have a new hit, at least to me, in Stacklands—it's city building by way of cards. By stacking cards you build up a cute little village, cutting logs, quarrying stone, growing food, and building the houses and sheds (oh, so many sheds) to keep it all. As you expand, you can sell excess resources for money, which you then exchange for packs of new, random cards to use for further growth.
It's something like the same set of mechanics as Cultist Simulator, but less aggressively mysterious and therefore less frustrating should you fail. For example, idea cards can be found in a lot of packs, and those just have one job: Tell you what to combine for an effect. You can then sell ideas for a bit of bonus cash.
Completing quests and building eventually lets you survive enough for new weird things to start happening... like strange portals. Maybe you should make some spears. Those might come in handy, eventually.
Stacklands took me about five hours to beat and costs $5, which for my money is pretty good. You can find Stacklands on itch.io and on Steam.
