Stackmon Review
Riftpoint’s Stackmon pairs Stacklands-style card crafting with creature collecting.
Stackmon. Credit: Riftpoint Entertainment / Alibi Games
Stackmon is the latest Stacklands-style crafting game I’ve played. The most recent ones I’ve enjoyed have been cooking themed. The gimmick for this one is combining monster collection à la Pokémon with crafting. The creatures, resources, and equipment are all cards you stack and combine to gather materials, craft supplies, and prepare for battles.
Sokpop Collective’s Stacklands established the formula, having you build a village by managing a table full of cards. Place a villager card onto a resource card and they’ll gather materials; stack the right materials together with a worker and they’ll craft an item or construct a building. Selling spare cards funds packs containing more resources and discoveries. Meanwhile, you have to keep your villagers fed.
What makes Stackmon a bit different from others I’ve played is the distinction between your base camp and adventuring. The camp is where you prepare for trips, gathering resources, crafting supplies, and housing your Stackmon. Completing quests earns energy to use while adventuring, giving you more time on the ticking stamina clock that determines how long you can stay out. If you leave and return to camp, all your cards will still be there, for better and worse.
Stackmon. Credit: Riftpoint Entertainment / Alibi Games
Leaving camp was my favorite part of Stackmon, partly because it meant getting away from the clutter. Adventures start you on clean boards with just a couple of packs. You can only bring cards that fit inside your backpack, and the same restriction applies to what you bring home. Anything outside your backpack when you finish a level or head back to camp gets left behind. It’s an interesting if sometimes frustrating design choice. Running out of stamina or having your entire team knocked out ends the outing. At least you still get a chance to pick up cards before you’re sent packing. Returning to camp doesn’t mean starting over, since you can resume from any level you’ve already reached.
Each level on the adventure map has requirements for moving forward, such as defeating a trainer. The biome conditions are the most interesting part, giving you more to think about than how much energy you have left. In the mountains, every card you pull from a pack increases a rockslide gauge, while defeating trainers brings it down. The desert puts your Stackmon at risk of overheating during daylight, making the world’s day/night cycle something you have to plan around. I was impressed by how much these conditions made me rethink my strategy. These wrinkles were the one thing keeping the game engaging for me over time.
Once a fight starts, your Stackmon attack automatically on a timer determined by their speed. Your role here is only support. You drop healing items or stat boosts onto your creature, or drop in another Stackmon to take over. Handling fights through the same card stacking keeps things consistent. Still, supporting an automatic fight was less strategically interesting to me than choosing attacks in Pokémon.
Stackmon. Credit: Riftpoint Entertainment / Alibi Games
The worst part of adventuring is having to come home to the mess. Stackmon doesn’t mitigate the most tedious part of games like this—the glut of cards spread all over the screen. Returning to that clutter deflated my enthusiasm after exploring. Organizing the cards just isn’t fun and makes the grindiness of the gameplay worse.
I liked the design of the Stackmon themselves. The rest of the game looks flat and unattractive, including biome backgrounds that do little to make exploring visually interesting. The cards are easy to read, but their flatness takes away from the pleasure of handling them. With the lackluster visuals, I feel like there could have been something done to make them feel better to move around, at least. A little juice would have gone a long way.
I can cautiously recommend Stackmon to players who enjoy card stacking and creature collecting, especially for the way its biome hazards complicate expeditions. However, the creatures and exploration don’t do enough to distinguish it from other card stackers or address the genre’s tedium. For me, going home to sort the cards was a chore that collecting more of them couldn’t overcome.
Stackmon
Stackmon adds creature collecting and adventuring to the Stacklands formula, though managing card clutter makes collecting more cards feel like a chore.
Riftpoint Entertainment’s Stackmon pairs Stacklands-style card crafting with creature collecting.