Show HN: Stacks – an hourly card solitaire about building four gardens

A new hourly puzzle game called Stacks has wandered onto Hacker News looking adorable and slightly chaotic: you place animal-and-plant cards into four “gardens,” chase score multipliers, and try to burn through a 40-card deck before the next daily reset. On paper, it sounds cozy. In the comments, though, the real harvest was confusion. The loudest reaction was basically: “This is gorgeous… but what on earth is happening?”

Players were openly enchanted by the pixel art, with multiple commenters stopping mid-confusion to praise the bees, toads, oaks, and general wholesome vibe. One person immediately asked whether the art was handmade or generated by artificial intelligence, while another just wanted to know how the creator made it because, yes, it really is that pretty. But then the mood swerved hard into gentle revolt. Several people said the rules were a “wall of text,” “hard to parse,” or flat-out “impenetrable,” with one commenter admitting they just started throwing cards around at random and hoped enlightenment would arrive later. The twist? They still wanted to keep playing.

That’s where the delicious mini-drama lives: the community seems charmed enough to care, but baffled enough to complain loudly. The hottest consensus is that Stacks desperately needs a guided tutorial or practice mode. Right now, players feel like they’ve been invited to a lovely garden party and then handed scoring rules written by a mysterious squirrel accountant.